Academia stories

So It Goes For Vonnegut

2005-05-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

At 78, Still Shaking up the Establishment

By David Abel
Globe Staff
5/05/2001

NORTHAMPTON -- He should be dead by now.

America's most cheerfully dour author is instead sitting anonymously on a stoop, staring blankly as a stream of tongue- and eyebrow-pierced students shuffle past, few of whom seem to recognize the old man bundled this spring morning in a rumpled trench coat and wool cap pulled over his ears.

Kurt Vonnegut survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in World War II and a fire last year that gutted his apartment. Now the craggy-faced novelist is whiling away his time at Smith College, teaching undergraduates not yet born when his novels, plays, and short stories began setting the standard for skewering authority and mocking the self-important.

For much of the past year, for a few hours a week, the grouchy hero to generations has sat in a small, dreary office hidden in the stacks of Smith's main library and waited for students. The only clue the old man inside might actually be the author of "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Cat's Cradle" is a red bumper sticker taped to the door that reads: "God is coming and is she pissed."

Despite his apparent anonymity, Vonnegut - whose term as writer-in-residence ends this month - has managed to raise a bit of a ruckus on campus. Many schools, including Smith before he arrived, he grouses, "have a most incomplete collection of my wonderful work." The author has since done his best to fill the gaps. Over the past year, he has spontaneously presented librarians with specially bound books, refusing to fill out the typical paperwork and declaring, "I'm Kurt Vonnegut and this is a book by Kurt Vonnegut."

There was some ambivalence at Smith before the college invited him for the academic year. A few English professors wondered what they would do with him. Could he teach a regular class? Would he ridicule the faculty? Would 18- to 22-year-old women who've grown up with the Internet relate to a 78-year-old man whose worldview was shaped by the barbarism of World War II?

"There was some doubt that we could find a traditional role for him," says Dean Flower, an English professor who has since befriended Vonnegut. "He's so famous for his irreverence. Some on the faculty worried he would satirize us and mock the value of classroom teaching."

The concerns proved unwarranted - more or less. Vonnegut certainly has derided the English department. In a public lecture to thousands of students and faculty, he joked, "You can't tell where a writer is going to be, except it's unlikely it will be in the English department."

But he has also spent hours with students, critiquing their stories, dishing out unsolicited advice on life, and answering questions about his work, which some of their professors have spent careers trying to understand.

Now, as he prepares to return to New York, the campus oddity lights up one of the day's many Pall Malls and jokes in his own morbidly slapstick way about a lawsuit he's planning. It's against the tobacco company that makes the unfiltered cigarettes he smokes with such conscious abandon: "They promised to kill me on the package," he complains with a smile, "and they haven't done it yet."

They almost did. The prisoner of war who survived the incineration of Dresden nearly died in a blaze of his own making last year. A cigarette he left in an ashtray torched much of his East Side Manhattan brownstone.

The fire, which the one-time volunteer firefighter tried to extinguish on his own, left Vonnegut in a hospital bed for nearly three weeks suffering from smoke inhalation. Needing time to recuperate, the author moved to Northampton, where several of his children and grandchildren live, and accepted an offer to spend two semesters at Smith.

Academia may not be the ideal place for a crotchety writer waiting to die. In fact, Vonnegut has never been fully accepted at the nation's elite schools. His books are often pigeonholed as "too popular" or "too easy," he says, and there are few college courses that treat his work with the weight conferred upon contemporaries such as John Updike and Saul Bellow.

But for all those at Smith who may scoff at his work, this is also a man who has charmed readers by making them laugh about horrors like the Holocaust or the Vietnam War.

For Nora Crow, an English professor who teaches satire at Smith and has been assigning Vonnegut to students since 1971, the opportunity to have Vonnegut visit her class is like a basketball coach bringing in Michael Jordan for a practice or a historian having Winston Churchill over to chat with students.

Ksenija Broks, a senior, chased Vonnegut down after he spoke at one of her classes. "It took a couple of beers and a few cigarettes in me before I had enough nerve to go up to him," she says. "The prospect of talking to Kurt Vonnegut was nothing other than scary."

The English major wanted to know what he meant when, just after leaving her satire seminar, he popped his head back in the door and gave students this cryptic message: "It's all a practical joke."

Eventually, with a slight buzz, she got her answer. "Literature is, and all the arts are, and even the Mona Lisa is a practical joke - there's no woman there, and yet, people care," Vonnegut told her in a meeting. "The practical joke is making people think something is going on which isn't really going on. A book is a practical joke or it doesn't work."

Mary Ann Krisa, another senior majoring in English, didn't resort to drink before meeting Vonnegut. But that didn't mean the 21-year-old wasn't nervous to hear one of her favorite authors critique her story. "I couldn't have been more intimidated," she says. It didn't help when she found his office. It was eerie. The lights were off, the shades down, the walls completely bare, and all he had in the room was a copy of her paper and a pencil.

When she walked in, Vonnegut said, "I'm glad you showed up. It seems the students aren't interested in meeting me."

They discussed her story for a while, an autobiographical piece she describes as a heart-rending account of her grandmother's death. Vonnegut found it too gushy. He gave her this advice: "Did you ever think of making your grandmother insane?"

Not every aspiring writer has been starstruck. Like a lot of students at Smith, MaryAnne Van Tyne barely knew Vonnegut's work before he came to campus. The 21-year-old junior applied for one of the few spots in his class at the last minute.

But she quickly realized her new professor was different, a bit more blunt than other professors, and definitely not an old windbag. "He talked a lot about drinking and bars," she says. "It was really refreshing because he's not PC at all. At Smith, there is an idea that you don't want to offend a woman's image. I guess he's reached a point in his life where he doesn't care and he'll just say whatever."

Of course, age has nothing to do with it. Vonnegut has always found a certain poetry in vulgarity, and his language hasn't been muted by the tacit taboos of the ivory tower.

And that has stirred a bit of discomfort at Smith. During his public lecture last fall, which he titled "How to get a job like mine" or "A performance with chalk on blackboard," Vonnegut strayed into forbidden territory. After getting laughs mocking the National Rifle Association and drubbing the Internet, the legendary technophobe told a self-effacing story about how he lusts for an Indian woman who works at a Manhattan grocery store and wonders whether, like dentures, she puts the jewel she wears between her eyes in a glass of water at night.

More than a few students gasped. The mix of laughter and shock sparked a staff editorial in the student newspaper headlined "Deify Celebs Much, Smith?" "Why did offended audience members feel compelled to tolerate Kurt Vonnegut saying such things, however the statements were intended, when they would have walked out on anyone else who uttered the same things?" the paper fumed, adding: "How many of you read your first Vonnegut book in August?"

Smith's writer-in-residence laughed when asked about the tizzy his comments caused. Then he got serious. "I'll say whatever I want; that's the price of my freedom," Vonnegut says. "If it hurts someone's feelings, too bad! That's the way it goes."

It isn't just students who have grown uneasy with the novelist's impolitic anecdotes. When he showed up in an old sweater with holes in the elbows to lecture in Elliot Fratkin's anthropology class, the professor remembers squirming a bit when Vonnegut said beauty is everywhere, including "a young coed leaning over to grab a book."

"A lot of us just looked down on the ground and wondered, `Where is he going?' " he says. "At Smith, it's not especially popular to talk about the beauty of the opposite sex."

Vonnegut has made more of his time at Smith than stirring up trouble. Over the past year, the author has read poems and told jokes at local cafes, scatted as the lead vocalist of a band he called "Special K and His Crew" in the city's annual talent show, exhibited what he calls his "new-cubist" artwork at a local gallery, and helped a local bar brew a beer his grandfather made more than a century ago. He has also been doing something he promised not to do: writing a new novel he's calling "If God Were Alive Today."

Vonnegut has written a last novel before - he even vowed in the prologue of his 1997 novel "Timequake" that he was finally finished. "Johannes Brahms quit composing symphonies when he was 55. Enough!" he wrote. "American male novelists have done their best work by then. Enough! Fifty-five is a long time ago for me now. Have pity!"

One recent morning, after lecturing a class reading about the absurdities of religion in "Cat's Cradle," the scraggly-haired author lights up another Pall Mall and explains in his half-joking, half-serious way why he broke his pledge in "Timequake."

"I didn't know," he says with a dose of light-hearted melancholy. "I thought I was going to die."

Many of his friends and family are now dead - and that has deeply affected him. But there is a more honest reason why Vonnegut is writing another book: He can't stop writing. If he did, it might really kill him.

"Writers are very lucky. They can treat their neuroses every day," he says. "When writers crack up, when they really end up in the nut house, is when they can't do it anymore. The treatment stops."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

The Nonbelievers

2005-05-17T20:45:00.000-07:00

By David Abel

Globe Staff

9/16/2007

Rosy-cheeked angels smile from stained-glass windows, and crucifixes hang on the granite walls. The vaulting stone arches lend voices a holy echo. A chandelier-illuminated red carpet leads to the large casket, which is covered with white roses.

When the balding man walks into the 165-year-old Gothic chapel, he greets mourners warmly, solemnly, with reverent words and tender handshakes, like a rabbi or a priest.

But the well-wisher in a pin-striped suit is no man of the cloth. He doesn’t wear flowing robes or a skullcap, and instead of a Bible or other sacred text, he carries a book titled Funerals Without God.

"This is Reverend Epstein," says a friend of the deceased, a physician who considered religion a pernicious fiction. Epstein interrupts: "It’s chaplain. . . . It’s OK. A lot of people aren’t sure what to call me."

Over the past two years, Greg Epstein, 30, has become a kind of ministerial paradox, a member of the local clergy who disavows God, preaches to atheists and agnostics, and seeks to build the equivalent of a church for nonbelievers and others skeptical of or alienated by religion. A former lead singer of a rock band, he now serves as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, one of a small but growing number of such chaplains for nonbelievers on college campuses.

In his position, which is endowed, he has helped marry and bury fellow atheists. He has presided over baby-naming ceremonies and organized a "coming out" ceremony for a congressman, Representative Pete Stark of California, one of the few public officials to acknowledge he doesn’t believe in God. He also counsels students and approximates evangelizing by handing out pamphlets with the question: "Are you a humanist?"

From the pulpit at Bigelow Chapel in Watertown, speaking with the slow cadence of a clergyman delivering a sermon, Epstein tells those gathered not to expect a traditional service. "We intend, of course, no disrespect to those who have religious beliefs. . . . We hope and believe you will find the occasion dignified and acceptable."

He continues: "A religious funeral is a celebration of a particular faith, giving homage to God. A humanist funeral is a celebration of the individual human life and his contribution to humanity."

Later, after delivering a homily that might have been heard on a Sunday morning, he explains the contradictions of his role. "I have a religious personality, without a scintilla of religious belief," he says. "If it’s an oxymoron to believe that people who have ceased to believe in God still need caring and community, then I’m proud to be a walking oxymoron."

In a world where zealots crash planes into buildings in the name of God and politicians use the Bible to craft public policy, Epstein sees himself as in the vanguard of an emerging movement fueled by the rise of skepticism, advances in science and technology, and a spreading aversion toward radical religious ideologies and traditions.

He and other humanists, who also call themselves atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, secularists, or brights, point to a survey published in January by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which found that 20 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 say they have no religious affiliation or consider themselves atheists or agnostics – nearly double those who said that in a similar survey 20 years ago.

Another Pew survey in March concluded the nation is witnessing a "reversal of increased religiosity observed in the mid-1990s." Today, 12 percent of Americans surveyed age 20 and older describe themselves as not religious, up from 8 percent in 1987. "This change," the survey’s authors wrote, "appears to be generational in nature, with each new generation displaying lower levels of religious commitment than the preceding one."

Epstein, a Jew from New York City who trained as a "humanist rabbi" after becoming disillusioned by the music industry during a year and a half crooning for a band called Sugar Pill, embodies that generational shift. He calls himself a humanist, because he sees it as a more embracing term than atheist. "Atheism is what I don’t believe in; humanism is what I do believe in," he says. He defines it as a "philosophy of life without supernaturalism that affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment aspiring to the greater good of humanity."

His deepening involvement in humanism has mirrored a rising interest in nonbelief throughout the country. Books about atheism have become a publishing phenomenon in the past few years, with five of the most popular combined accounting for more than a million copies in print. Some have spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, such as Sam Harris’s 2004 The End of Faith. The publisher of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything had printed some 300,000 copies less than two months after it went on sale this year. Other popular titles include evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, of which there are more than a half million hardcover copies in print; Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Tufts University philosophy professor Daniel Dennett; and God: The Failed Hypothesis by Victor J. Stenger.

The spike in interest in atheism can be attributed to a backlash against militant Islam and a response to the faith-based initiatives and religiosity of the Bush administration, says Steven Pinker, the cognitive scientist at Harvard whom the American Humanist Association last year named its Humanist of the Year. But he says interest in the new literature also reflects how science is increasingly displacing religion as a way people understand the world.

"Aside from fundamentalists, most people [outside the United States] have given up on creationism and seeing the Earth as the center of the universe," he says. "More and more of what used to be the domain of religion has been ceded to science. It’s the trend of modernity. I think this is a tide. We’ve seen it happen everywhere else in the developed world. This is the direction of history."

Students on college campuses and others have begun to organize nonbelievers. The number of campus groups affiliated with the Secular Student Alliance, for example, has increased by more than 50 percent in the past two years, to more than 80 groups, says August E. Brunsman IV, executive director of the Albany, New York-based alliance. Since January, the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, a science-promoting umbrella group, has sponsored or helped organize more than 50 atheist outfits on campuses from the University of Georgia Law School to the University of Texas at Austin to Kent State University in Ohio, says D.J. Grothe, the center’s vice president of outreach.

The MySpace atheist and agnostic group has grown by about 10,000 members a year since it began in 2004 and now is about one third the size of MySpace’s largest Christian group, says Bryan J. Pesta, an assistant professor of management at Cleveland State University, who moderates the group.
"We need to get visible and let people know that we’re much more like [believers] than different from them," Brunsman says. "By banding together under the umbrella of nontheism, we can show the country that we are a sizable part of the population, and we can show closeted nontheists that they are not alone."

Five years ago, to try to change the low opinion many Americans have of atheists (a national Gallup poll this year found more than half of those surveyed would not vote for an atheist for president), a group of four organizations started the Secular Coalition for America. Now, the coalition employs a full-time lobbyist in Washington, regularly issues press releases about everything from stem cell research to religious language used by politicians, and represents eight national organizations with more than 25,000 members, more than a third from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Lori Lipman Brown, the coalition’s director, acknowledges they have a long way to go in a country where, polls show, two-thirds of the population still believes in God. But the venom she used to hear has faded.

"When I’m on right-wing radio or Christian radio, I no longer hear people say as much that I’m immoral or liable to commit murder," she says. "Now, it seems, they acknowledge it’s possible that I could be a good person."

Humanists trace their roots to the ancient Greeks, among them philosopher Diagoras, who burned images of the era’s gods. Their apostate forebears include the philosophers David Hume, who promoted skepticism and logical reasoning during the Enlightenment; Karl Marx, who likened religion to opium; Friedrich Nietzsche, who gained infamy by declaring God dead; and novelist Ayn Rand, who argued that reason is our only guide to action. Even Mother Teresa doubted the existence of God, according to a new book that unveils her private journals and letters. Humanists align themselves with more recent proponents of ridding society of God, including the author Dawkins, the popular astronomer Carl Sagan, and the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who in 1980 asked a Unitarian congregation in Cambridge: "How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?"

Today, Americans appear to be following a larger trend of people around the world abandoning organized religion, particularly those in wealthier, more educated countries. In the 2007 Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, studied religion surveys in some 50 countries. Over the past 50 years, according to a 2004 survey he cites, the percentage of people believing in God has plunged in Sweden, where as many as 85 percent of the population now say they don’t believe in God; Australia, where about 25 percent are nonbelievers; Canada, where as many as 30 percent don’t believe in God; and Japan, where about 65 percent are now nonbelievers.

Overall, according to 2007 World Almanac, there are nearly 1 billion nonbelievers in the world, which would make them the world’s third-largest persuasion, after Christianity and Islam.

While the ranks of nonbelievers are increasing, they likely account for a decreasing percentage of the world’s population, as religious nations tend to have higher birth rates, Zuckerman notes. In India, for example, he cites surveys that show between 3 percent and 6 percent of the population say they don’t believe in God. In the Middle East, where Islam – the world’s fastest-growing religion with about 1.3 billion adherents (about 800 million fewer than Christianity) – thrives, Zuckerman cites surveys showing that fewer than 1 percent of those in countries including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Syria say they don’t believe in God.

"Making definite predictions of the future growth or decline of atheism [is] difficult," Zuckerman writes. "What is clear is that while most people continue to maintain a firm belief in deities . . . in certain societies, nonbelief in God is definitely increasing."

Here in the United States, where atheism remains a relatively weak current against the tides of religion, the rising interest in Godlessness is most visible on college campuses and among recent graduates. Many of them regard religion as the perpetuation of superstitions and mythology and see the world’s largest faiths as sowing division and enmity more than the peace they profess.

Nina Lee, president of the Tufts Freethought Society, says a university survey of the Class of 2009 showed nearly one-third of her fellow students cited no religious affiliation – equal to those identifying themselves as Christian. Many of those who listed a religion, she says, are not actually religious. "I don’t think people are taking religious beliefs as seriously as they used to, but they still go through the habit of using religion as a way to meet people and as a social space," says Lee, 22, a senior majoring in psychology who was raised by Chinese Buddhists but who embraces humanism today. Lee studied religion but says she found no evidence to support it – her prayers to Jesus and Buddhist deities went unanswered, she says – and faults religion for standing in the way of science.

"I oppose any ideology that motivates people to ignore or deny scientific evidence, especially when that evidence is crucial for improving people’s lives," she says.

David Rand went to Hebrew school until he was a senior in high school. But the 25-year-old graduate student at Harvard never really believed in God and was excited to find like-minded students when he left home. "I don’t think religion is the source of all evil, but I think it can be a source of division in a world that does not need division," says Rand, who studies biology. "I don’t find the answers offered by religion satisfactory. Trying to find answers rationally is much more satisfying. . . . I think there’s also pleasure and beauty in natural explanations."

Zach Bos, 25, who works at Boston University and serves as director of the group Boston Atheists, grew up going to Sunday Mass, was active in his church’s youth group, and was confirmed as a Catholic. But now, he says, "my atheism is sustained by the continual absence of evidence for a single supernatural event. You might as well ask if my belief in gravity is sustained; it is only insofar as I haven’t seen any apples falling up off the tree today."

Still, for Bos and the others, there’s something missing, and it’s a void Greg Epstein wants to fill.

From his office in Harvard Yard, where the shelves are crammed with hundreds of books including Who’s Who in Hell, Politics at God’s Funeral, and Losing Faith in Faith, Epstein can’t escape the religious. He works in the bowels of the Memorial Church, where prayers literally seep through his walls and an organ groans from above. Crucifixes abound, and the surrounding offices are filled with Harvard’s faith-oriented chaplains.

But unlike other humanists, many of whom argue that acceptance of even moderate views about religion legitimizes religious extremists, Epstein is more ecumenical in his atheism. He has even sparked controversy by criticizing more militant, religion-bashing atheists – in a press release promoting a conference on humanism last spring, his office referred to that group as "fundamentalists."

His goal is to prod nonbelievers to go beyond denouncing religion and denying the existence of God; he wants them to focus on what they value, what unites such a disparate array of people and views. "Life can be lonely, challenging, and we need community," he says. "We do want to be part of something bigger than ourselves."

In the office of his chaplaincy, which has an endowment worth more than $2 million and pays him a salary of $20,000, Epstein keeps a stack of cards printed with a summary of the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Manifesto III, a successor to a draft from 1933. The foldout card lists maxims such as "Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis"; "Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience"; and "Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness."

Epstein wants those bullet points to be more than bromides. Ironically, he would like humanism to share some of the accouterments and traditions of religion, sans notions of heaven and hell, of course. He envisions common songs, rites for weddings and funerals, and common spaces that might substitute for churches. "We have this critical mass of people that need more," he says, adding that nonbelievers need to build humanism so that it’s thought of as beautiful and inspiring. "You should be able to get out and say, ‘I did humanism.’ "

But Epstein’s vision and criticism of fellow atheists has angered some of the very people he wants to unite. R. Joseph Hoffmann, a senior vice president at the Center for Inquiry , argues that Epstein has "abused" his links to Harvard "as a shortcut to the legitimacy he craves."

In a letter that has made rounds in the blogosphere since last spring, Hoffmann wrote: "If the word spiritual works, they wear it; but if they need to spin things in a secular direction to win friends and influence people, they spin away like sodden spiders. This is Gen-X humanism for the Passionately Confused, and owes almost nothing to philosophy, intellectual commitment, or serious political involvement. It’s about bringing people to the table because eating together is always nice. Family-time, yes?"

The letter added: "What makes Epstein special is his determination to turn his role into that of World Leader of the New Humanism, using the Harvard name as a whip to bring recalcitrant or struggling humanist groups into his new order."

In one posting on his popular atheism blog, Brian Flemming, the director of the film The God Who Wasn’t There, called Epstein a "train wreck" who "seems determined to take the worst possible approach in his response to the controversy he started" when he used the "fundamentalists" label, which atheists consider a religious epithet.

"The accusation that blunt but reasoning atheists . . . are equivalent to the dogmatic fundamentalists on the other side is false, quite dumb, and constantly deployed by their enemies to derail useful conversation," Flemming wrote. "And that is not something of which you want to be part."

In response to his critics, Epstein – who speaks softly and has a gentle, rabbinical way about him – says the "fundamentalist" label was misinterpreted but that he has no intention of curtailing his efforts to promote a more communal humanism. "I’m proud to say I want and need to be part of a supportive community. Sadly, this can stir up the emotions of a few atheists who have been wounded by religion and want to distance themselves from it. . . . It’s true that religion has done some terrible, irrational things, but the key question for a humanist isn’t ‘Who am I angry at?’ It’s ‘How can I make this world a better place?’ "

On his blog at Harvard, Epstein wrote that he hopes atheists avoid vilifying believers as they have disparaged atheists. "I don’t even have a problem with all the people who are blogging about me right now and slamming me as some kind of representative of ‘appeasement,’ " he wrote. "We want to be treated as equals? Let’s raise hell about it, fine, but perhaps think twice about slamming me so hard as some kind of Uncle Tom (I definitely heard that one on a few blogs) if I want to speak for myself, and for the millions of atheists and Humanists out there who actually *like* and care deeply about a lot of religious people and don’t feel the need to hurt their feelings in addition to disagreeing with them."

The rift occurred as Epstein was about to assume a much larger mantle. After months of planning – arranging satellite links, choreographing schedules, and securing speakers such as the novelist Salman Rushdie, the Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist E.O. Wilson, and Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen – Epstein used his perch at Harvard to host more than a thousand nonbelievers at the humanism conference in Cambridge in April.

As a jab at his critics and to draw a distinction between their views, he titled the gathering "The New Humanism."

The conference, which featured speakers including Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and a performance by the folk singer Dar Williams, was so packed that organizers had to turn people away. The panel discussions, stamped with Epstein’s agenda, had titles like "Toward an Abrahamic Humanism" and "Dialogue Among Religions, Cultures, and Civilizations." There was even an invocation read for the dead.

The most attended event was at Memorial Church, beneath a large crucifix, where Rushdie received an award. As the author of The Satanic Verses spoke amid the surrounding emblems of religion, he joked: "Thank you all for coming to this little Black Sabbath." Rushdie talked about growing up without religion and said his family celebrated holidays from many religions. But he later wondered: "Where’s the one for the unbelievers? Where is the Kwanzaa for the atheists? Surely we could make one of those up, [like] Atheismas."

The allusions to religion upset some atheists, a few of whom described events at the conference as "religious humanism." Rebecca Watson, the editor of Skepchick magazine who spoke at a panel presentation titled "The Next Generation of Humanism," says she supports the building of a support network for humanists. But on her blog, she wrote about the conference’s "disturbing trend of kowtowing to religion." She cited a teleconference Epstein organized with the Southern Baptist Convention and his dubbing the earth "The Creation," which Epstein later explained was a reference to the title of E.O. Wilson’s latest book.

"A number of the talks were sermons," she wrote. "I mean, they were really, really sermons, just without the god. The syntax, the tone, and some of the message (such as pleas for money) made many in the audience noticeably uncomfortable."

A few weeks later, while working on a book about what he calls "cultural humanism" and planning a class at Harvard Divinity School he has titled "Humanist Polity: Building a Community for Atheists, Agnostics, and the Non-Religious," Epstein learned of the death of 66-year-old physician Don Burke. He had attended the conference and helped support the humanist chaplaincy, which was founded in 1974 by Catholic priest turned atheist Thomas Ferrick and endowed in 1995 as part of a $100 million gift to Harvard by the philanthropist John L. Loeb.

Leading the service for Burke was a chance to act on his vision, to begin filling the emptiness inherent in atheism. So Epstein, who succeeded Ferrick as humanist chaplain two years ago, began perusing Funerals Without God to prepare for this day, his first humanist funeral. Standing at the pulpit of the ornate chapel in Watertown, Epstein delivers a eulogy that could be appropriate in any tradition. He reads a poem, Wendell Berry’s "The Peace of Wild Things," about the beauty of nature, asks those gathered to stand in honor of the man, and provides time for silent prayers (or reflection).

Epstein relays a story Burke told him of how he came to identify as a humanist after growing up in Ireland, where some people believed in ghosts. He "could not believe in such unseen things and was outraged by the way such beliefs terrified people into living their whole lives in unnecessary fear," Epstein says. "And so from his early boyhood he sought a more rational, scientific way of life."

Then he addresses death by quoting Sherwin Wine, a humanist Epstein considered a mentor. "It is so overwhelmingly final that it fills our lives with dread and anxious fear," Epstein says. "We cry out at the injustice of destiny and wait for answers that never seem to come."

To cope with it, he says, humanists need a certain courage. "Courage is loving life, even in the face of death. It is sharing our strength with others, even when we feel weak. It is embracing our family and friends, even when we fear to lose them. It is opening ourselves to love."

Before closing with a meditation on the precariousness of life, Epstein offers lines adapted from a familiar Christian burial rite.

"His body we commit to be burned and returned to the cycles of nature," he says. "Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

A Plummet from Grace

2005-05-17T20:44:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
Globe Staff
4/09/2002

A stately man in a black fedora and charcoal overcoat solemnly steps off a trolley, thrusts his hands to the sky, and squawks to a swarm of pigeons swooping down from nearby rooftops: "Come'ere Wingtip . . . come'ere Speckles . . . come'ere Checkers."

On cue, scores of plump birds surround the gray-haired former professor, hunting for the scattered presents of cracked corn he's tossing along a corner of Boston University's windswept Marsh Plaza.

"When they're in flight," he says as pigeons hover over his head, "there's no more beautiful bird in the world."

This is a good day for John Kidd. The 49-year-old made it out of bed.

A decade ago, scholars around the world lauded Kidd as a brash, young intellectual who - like a "scholarly version of General Norman Schwarzkopf," as one writer called him after the Gulf War - was destined for academic glory.

At 32, as a lanky postdoctoral student at the University of Virginia, he exposed a raft of errors in what many established scholars accepted as the definitive edition of one of the most renowned and controversial novels of all time, James Joyce's "Ulysses." Ultimately, his critique won over literary critics, and Kidd quickly earned a name as a leading authority on Ireland's literary giant. The academic triumph also earned Kidd a six-figure advance from W. W. Norton & Co. for his own edition of "Ulysses," as well as a job directing a new research center on Joyce at Boston University.

Two years ago, however, the quirky son of a Navy captain quit academia amid allegations that he sexually harassed and unfairly failed some of his students and concerns about his propensity for befriending a range of creatures, from worms to rats to pigeons.

Now, Kidd is broke, jobless, and in such poor health, he says he has trouble writing more than a few sentences. At times it's a struggle just to read the newspaper, he says.

After delays in delivering his manuscript and a host of copyright problems, W. W. Norton indefinitely delayed the publication of his edition of "Ulysses." Once the subject of flattering profiles and a contributor to prestigious literary magazines, he hasn't published a paper in years.

And with a worsening "neurological disorder" that causes him tremors, seizures, and chronic fatigue, Kidd lives mainly off disability checks, spending his days either in bed, watching movies, or, whenever he can, trekking a few blocks from his Brookline apartment to feed the pigeons.

Although he no longer teaches at BU and the school closed down the James Joyce Research Center in 1999, Kidd hasn't really left the campus along Commonwealth Avenue - and his lingering presence from the student union to outside his old office occasionally causes a stir.

For one thing, campus officials say the former professor owes the university about $25,000 for storing thousands of his books, a personal library of Joyce's work that Kidd says is the largest individual collection of one author anywhere. The debt, which he disputes, is on top of more than a half-million dollar investment BU lost in the professor's failed project developing a CD-ROM on the Irish author.

Administrators say school staff members have complained that Kidd follows them around campus, harangues them, and, as recently as a few weeks ago, "verbally abused" one university employee.

"John is a very savvy, literate, and courageous guy who goes off half-cocked sometimes, talks too much, and rubs a lot of people the wrong way," says Roger Shattuck, a retired BU university professor who persuaded school officials to hire Kidd after the two met at the University of Virginia in the early 1980s. "I think a lot of people felt that his style was too excessive and too aggressive."

Kidd's 'Joyce Wars' cement his reputation
Kidd earned his reputation quickly. In 1985, while still in Virginia, he delivered a scathing paper in New York, repudiating at least half of the 5,000 "corrections" made by the acclaimed German scholar Hans Walter Gabler in his 1984 Random House edition of "Ulysses." The 240,000-word novel, riddled with errors, was published in 1922 by French printers who didn't speak English.

Three years after Kidd's paper, and not long after he wrote an essay titled "The Scandal of Ulysses" in the New York Review of Books, Random House acknowledged Gabler's edition appeared "seriously flawed" and the publisher reissued an earlier edition of Joyce's novel.

To this day, Kidd's victory in what became known as the "Joyce Wars" has Gabler bristling. He contends that Kidd's attacks "put Joyce scholarship back by 10 years" and that "his criticism was valid in a half-dozen minor points, but they were not at all valid at-large."

But the German scholar says he takes no pleasure from the failings of his former adversary. "I'm just sorry to see that he won't be able to put those criticisms to the test by an edition of his own," says Gabler, reached at his home in Munich. "I find it very sad, a very tragic development, but I do not find it very surprising. I think it's a symptom of having got himself into the trouble of the expectations he raised."

Unfortunately for Kidd, W. W. Norton's president, Drake McFeely, says it's unlikely the publisher will release Kidd's "Ulysses" anytime soon. Because of extentions to the copyright in the early 1990s, he says, Kidd's edition can't be published for two decades.

"It's not out of the question we won't publish it then. But that's a long time from now, and we have a lot of other projects," says McFeely. He said his company paid Kidd only a portion of the $350,000 advance it reportedly gave him in 1988.

The option of returning to a career teaching at a major university doesn't look promising either.

Toward the end of his time at BU, colleagues say Kidd became "estranged from the community of academics" and obsessive about Joyce, even affecting the novelist's appearance.

Administrators also say they were frustrated by the professor's failure to deliver.

"John's early work, his command of such a complicated writer as Joyce, seemed to promise great scholarly work," says Dennis Berkey, dean of arts and sciences and provost of BU. "It may have been the case of a relatively young scholar taking up an overwhelmingly large project. But some people have the ability to conceive work and bring it to conclusion. John didn't."

Former educator's vow of comeback in doubt
Spreading the remains of a bag of corn along the stones outside Marsh chapel, and pointing out which birds are a couple and which he has brought home on occasion, Kidd promises a comeback. He contends that the publishing companies have conspired against him to block the release of his manuscript, which he vows will be printed sometime soon.

First, he has to fight an illness, which he kept secret throughout his career, though it steadily eroded his strength. He won't say exactly what it is he's suffering from, but he shows prescriptions for drugs to treat seizures, narcolepsy, and Parkinson's.

"I'm not a basket case," he says. "I'm planning to get well and to retire in my 70s."

At least one of his old friends, a benefactor who continues to help Kidd amass a collection of some 10,000 Joyce books, is not as optimistic about the professor's prospects.

"I'm very concerned about him," says Decherd Turner, a retired director of the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. "He's so valuable as a scholar, but he's paying the price now for rocking the boat. John Kidd never had any use for the establishment."

So, for now, the unmarried professor spends his good days reading a few newspaper articles, warding off the hawks that prey on his pigeons, and plotting his next moves.

As the sun sets and the birds fly back to their perches from the windy plaza, he describes a bad day like this: "I'm just like a brain in a jar . . . I can't do anything."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

The Duke Walks the Walk

2005-05-17T20:42:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
Globe Staff
5/11/2003

There, at the edge of the grassy field, it glints in the morning sun, beckoning the well-dressed man with the furry eyebrows. It mars his way to work. To him, it's an egregious sight in an otherwise pristine part of the park.

At 69, he doesn't move as fast as he used to, but he won't let this one get away, no matter what the muddy grounds may do to his penny loafers. With a canvas Amtrak bag in one hand and a fistful of garbage in the other, the son of Greek immigrants darts toward the purple candy wrapper, chasing after it as a sudden breeze lifts it just beyond his reach.

"I mean, look at this crap!" he growls, finally snaring the offensive refuse. "It's appalling, disgraceful. There's just no excuse for it."

It might strike some as laughable that a man who once ran for president and held the highest office in Massachusetts now spends his morning commute indignantly collecting other people's trash and cursing a decade's worth of politicians and bureaucrats.

But for former Governor Michael Dukakis nothing has changed: When you leave office, he says, you don't stop caring.

There are many issues the former governor gets passionate about - teaching, high-speed rail - but this morning, it's all about litter.

"It's enough to drive you out of your mind," he says. "You see it all over the place and you have to ask: Why isn't anyone dealing with this?"

The governor has met with his successors about it. He has harangued officials at the Metropolitan District Commission, which preserves parks in the Boston area, as well as local park administrators.

Frustrated with government excuses about budget cuts and bureaucratic delays, Dukakis tries to lead by example - every weekday he's around when it's not raining or snowing.

At 7:30, two hours after rising, ripping through two newspapers and devouring slices of his own homemade bread, he sets off from his Brookline home for Northeastern University, where he has been teaching government for a decade. If he doesn't take a bag with him, he either finds one along the way or just collects what he can hold until finding a trashcan.

On a recent morning, dressed in a jacket and tie for a conference featuring the current governor, it takes only a few paces past his driveway for him to barehand an old, soggy newspaper, a used tissue, and a leaky styrofoam cup. The stench doesn't faze him.

"This is nothing," he says.

Down a stairwell and trotting the banks of the Muddy River, he points to reeds and junk waiting to be dredged. "I left a plan for [former Governor William] Weld 13 years ago to do this, and only now are we getting to it," he fumes.

As people pass, some smile but many don't seem to recognize him. If they're younger than 25 years old, he says, it's likely he's a nobody to them.

Seeing the governor gather trash, Dukakis says one man recently told him: "We had higher aspirations for you once."

But picking up trash is what it's all about - doing what you can, he says. Of course, that doesn't mean he can't complain. Upon seeing graffiti scrawled on a mailbox, he carps: "Who is this idiot? What is this? What kind of gratification do they get from this kind of thing?"

Then there are the leftover encampments from people who have burrowed homes in wooded areas along the way. Seeing all the mangy blankets, old clothes, and cracked bottles in dense piles riles the governor.

He would clean it up, he says, but sometimes there's too much stuff for one person. It would take a truck, he says, adding that the Metropolitan District Commission is not doing its job. Then he points to a bag sitting next to a bench in the Fenway. Filled with sludge he gathered two weeks ago, he says it hasn't moved since.

More proof: a collection of bottles and cans in one swampy section of the Muddy River. It's where Dukakis draws the line. "I don't go into the water," he says. "Someone else has to do that."

Closer to Northeastern in Clemente Park, he sees a sign of hope: a man raking. As if still campaigning, he walks toward the worker and in his signature baritone says: "Mike Dukakis, how are ya?"

Gerard Recupero smiles and identifies himself. "Sure I recognize you," he says. "Good to see you, Mr. Dukakis."

The two chat about litter for a minute, but Dukakis has to go. There's more trash to pick up, and he's running late.

An hour after he started, the two-mile journey ends at Northeastern's Meserve Hall. He finds a receptacle and drops in his last pile of trash - a stuffed plastic bag. All done without a smudge on his navy blazer. His perfectly combed hair hasn't budged during the commute.

Before taking off for his morning class, he parries questions about whether he's depressed by the way things have turned out. Politically, he says: "This is the worst national administration I've lived under." A conservative Republican also now holds his old job. And, recently, in the course of a week, he lost his mother and father-in-law.

Yet with teaching going well, calls each day from people interested in hearing him speak, and four grandchildren, he insists: "I feel like a million bucks."

For the city's necklace of parks, however, he says things are coming apart. "There's just too much neglect," he says. "Things are worse than when I was governor."

So these days, in the evening, if the weather's right, he may be back out there, picking trash on his way home.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com

Copyright, The Boston Globe

A Life's Work

2005-05-17T20:38:00.000-07:00

David Abel
Globe Staff
6/12/2001

Herb Adams freely admits he's a lunatic.

A mixture of madness and obsession, after all, is essential to carry out the kind of laborious life-long mission the 77-year-old so relentlessly set out on after returning to Boston from World War II.

"It's true, I'm as crazy as a hoot owl,'' he says. "They should've put me in a nuthouse a long time ago.''

Ever since accompanying his fiancée on May 18, 1946, to the wedding of a cousin who descended from one of the nation's oldest colonial families, the Tufts, Adams has had one all-consuming hobby. An amateur genealogist, who as a boy proved his parents were both related to the nation's second and sixth presidents, Adams resolved to find the link between his bride-to-be and the family who founded Tufts University.

Fifty-five years later, long after he and his wife divorced, the grizzled veteran is still plugging away at a pastime that has evolved into a mammoth project tracing the history of the Tufts back to the 5th century and linking nearly 50,000 descendants into two annotated, yet-to-be-published 1,250-page books. "This is going to be one of the largest most complete genealogies of any family in the world,'' he says.

Yet the stooped septuagenarian is running out of time. Slightly deaf, his eyesight fading, and an old limp from a war wound getting worse, Adams has spent nearly every day of the last two decades in the same seat at the Boston Public Library working at a furious pace to publish his work by Christmas 2002.

Craning over a pile of books and peering through a large magnifying glass, the short man in a hole-riddled sweater and well-shined shoes has become such a fixture in seat 267 of Bates Hall that librarians and security guards get nervous on the rare occasion he doesn't show up 9 a.m. sharp. Adams now even informs librarians, many of whom he drives crazy with requests to locate as many as 700 books a week, when he takes a day off to work at home.

"We're afraid Mr. Adams won't finish,'' says Patricia Feeley, one of several librarians who has known him for more than a decade but still address him formally. "He's such a perfectionist. He doesn't want to miss anyone before the book is published. The problem is he isn't getting any younger.''

To the skeptics, and there are a few in the Tufts family, the retired Massachusetts tax assessor says even though he now spends as much as 20 hours a day on the project, the serious legwork is already done.

Over the years, Adams has visited every cemetery and grave in New England east of the Connecticut River, read through tens of thousands of books, deeds, and official notices at nearly every library and town hall in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire, and he has perused just about every obituary, birth, and wedding announcement published in a New England newspaper since 1704.

In pursuit of all the descendants of Peter Tufts, the family's US patriarch who arrived in Charlestown around 1638, Adams has united thousands of Tufts relatives by organizing reunions and circulating a newsletter since 1975. In all, he maintains contact with some 4,000 descendants, some of whom were slaves, from all 50 states and countries including India, Cuba, and Great Britain.

"There are those who say I'm a liar, that I'm an idiot if I think they'll believe I have 48,000 names in the index of my book,'' says Adams, a mostly self-taught man who says he dropped out of MIT because he couldn't do logarithms. "But everything in my book is scrupulously researched. Everything has a citation for where it was found.''

To meet his timeline, Adams says he begins his work at 4 a.m., spends the day at the library, and then returns home and continues his work until midnight. Using a computer recently donated by a Tufts descendant, he spends his time reviewing records, writing letters in search of lost Tufts, and, among other tasks, completing the biographies of those he has found. Much of the work takes place in his paper-strewn apartment in Mattapan, which his wife complains "looks like the devil walked through in a mad rage.''

The mess has taken on such a proportion that the Adams' landlord is now trying to evict the couple because of the threat of a fire. "There's not much we can do,'' says Adams' wife of the past 32 years, Sylvia. "I gave up long ago telling him to get rid of the papers. He has boxes and boxes of stuff from god knows when. I don't believe we'll be able to find another place to store it all.''

The couple's precarious living situation is not the first problem to result, at least in part, from Adams' tunnel vision. For years, the two have lived on very little income (Adams says he hopes sales from the book will eventually make life easier), they have few friends, and Adams hasn't spoken to his oldest son in more than 20 years.

While Sylvia has learned to live with her husband's monomania, his first wife couldn't. Adams tells a story about one weekend jaunt with the Tufts descendant: "She blew her stack,'' he says. "Apparently, she wasn't interested in waiting outside a cemetery while I looked at gravestones.''

There have been problems with his work, too. In the early 1970s, Jay Franklin Tufts, a retired salesman and an amateur genealogist from Cleveland, Ohio, sued Adams for infringing on the copyright of his 1963 book, a "Tufts Family History.'' Tufts dropped the suit, according to Adams, after he realized his work was but "a silly rendition'' compared with Adams' "massive compilation.''

Three decades later, William Sanford Tufts, a cousin of the late Jay Franklin, says the only reason Tufts withdrew his lawsuit was because a genealogy can't by copyrighted. Ironically, Adams later accused William Sanford of the same offense. In a letter several years ago, Adams denounced William Sanford for posting early versions of his work on the Internet and called him "an evil plotter with an underhanded scheme to destroy confidence'' in his research.

The two, who once collaborated, haven't spoken in years and William Sanford now wonders if anything will ever come of the thousands of dollars Tufts family members have sent Adams. "He's been going to publish his work for the last 20 years,'' he says. "I don't think it's ever going to be published. It's like the old guy who fishes in the lake for the big fish and realizes his life's over if he actually catches it. What else is he going to do if he publishes the book?''

Adams shrugs off such doubts. "They'll see,'' he says, adding about 1,000 Tufts have already requested a copy of his book. "I have no plans on dying soon.''

The delay in completing his half-century effort that traces Tufts as far back as 20 generations has had more to do with technological glitches and financial constraints than legal and personal spats, he says.

It wasn't until the early 1990s, after decades of hunting and pecking on seven typewriters and a word processor, that Tufts relatives bought him a computer. Yet the new hardware was anything but an elixir; a decade later, Adams says he still has no idea how to use it. Occasional computer malfunctions have been the source of depression, he says, and have brought his book to a "screeching halt'' for months at a time.

"Herb's of a generation who's not into machines,'' says Terence Tufts, an engineer from Arlington Heights, Ill., and vice president of the Tufts' family association. "He doesn't have the education to do what he's doing, either. But he's a workaholic and a meticulous researcher. He isn't the type to quit. In fact, I think someone once told him he couldn't do it. After all these years, maybe he's just trying to prove them wrong.''

The financial pressures have been just as infuriating. In an effort to offer family members an early peek at his work, Adams once locked himself in a friend's office and spent 12 hours a day over several weeks doing nothing but making some 35,000 photocopies. But his free printing plan failed. Adams overloaded the machine and his friend asked him to stop.

Then there are the thousands of dollars he has spent over the years in postage. "I am not a phone person,'' he says. "It's not cheap communicating with all the Tufts. For a while, my greatest worry had been how I would pay for the postage to notify them when the book is published.''

In the scheme of things, of course, the technical and financial pressures mean little. The more serious concern for many in the Tufts family is Adams' health.

Less than a year ago, on Halloween, an ambulance ferried Adams to a local hospital after arteries in his bad leg clotted. It was the first time the old soldier had seen a doctor since he was shot in the war. Now, he says, "I'm taking pills for all kinds of things.''

While Adams jokes about his health, many longtime supporters are worried he won't see the fruits of his labor. "No one knows the Tufts family better than Herb,'' says Donald Tufts, a past president of the family association who lives in Savannah, Tenn., and would take over for Adams if something happens. "I'm confident he'll get it done. The only reason he won't finish is because he dies -- and that would be terrible, terrible for Herb and the family.''

Between trips one recent morning from the copy machine to the computer in Bates Hall, the old man with slicked gray hair and sharp blue eyes settles into his corner seat next to shelves of New England history books. When asked why he has stuck it out all these years, his raspy voice rises louder than his neighbors would like as he quotes one of his relatives, Helen Adams Keller: "We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.''

And no matter how much work he has left -- there is a lot, he says -- Adams is doing what he has always wanted to do. His first wife and the archivists at Tufts University may be oblivious to his work, but he couldn't care less. Lugging a ratty canvass bag stuffed with book request forms and a sheaf of random pages from his 4-inch-thick opus, the genealogist heads off to find a few more books.

He turns back, and whispers: "Whatever anyone says about Herb Adams, 'I did it my way.''

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Torture at Commencement

2005-05-17T20:34:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
Globe Staff
6/05/2000

Senator Edward M. Kennedy delivers a dense speech on health care policy to the hundreds of students graduating Bentley College.

At the Berklee College of Music's commencement ceremony, John Sykes, the president of the music video channel VH1, spends a good chunk of his speech reciting the channel's achievements.

And after receiving his first honorary degree from a US university, Northern Ireland's Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams stands before thousands graduating the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and briefs them on the latest intricacies of the peace process.

Commencement speeches have long been the realm of inspiration, including exhortations for graduates to fulfill their potential, advice on the dos and dont's of adulthood, and other wisdom to chew on as students depart the shelter of ivory towers.

But not every student is graced by such rousing rhetoric. Most colleges even prefer prominent people, such as a president or a Nobel laureate, to make memorable policy announcements, as did former secretary of state George C. Marshall in 1947 when he announced the Marshall Plan at Harvard.

Yet, commencement speeches, all too often miss the point, students say, with scientists detailing arcane theories, politicians promoting party platforms, and corporate executives touting products.

After Kennedy outlined the proposed "Paycheck Fairness Act," one graduate said, "It felt like this was just another chance for him to get before a microphone." At Berklee, after Sykes's speech, a student groused: "Did he have to sell his product to us during the ceremony?" And at UMass Lowell, the friend of a graduate wondered why politicians are invited to speak at commencements, "It's about them and their cause, not the students."

In attacking "trite, empty, long-winded orations" in the introduction of his new book "Onward! Twenty-Five Years of Advice, Exhortation, and Inspiration From America's Best Commencement Speeches," Northampton writer Peter J. Smith spells out clear rules of such addresses.

The speeches, he says, should be no longer than 15 minutes. They should be witty and amusing. They should avoid the minutiae of policy as well as "then-now" statements, including, "When I graduated the price of milk was . . . and now you all have webs to deal with . . ."

A speech should not be a screed, advertisement, recycled by the insertion of a few current references or one better delivered on the floor of the Senate, Smith said.

"Many speeches deserve their crummy reputation," he said. The political cartoonist Garry Trudeau, Smith writes in his book, once said, commencement speeches "were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated."

Three years ago, a now famous Chicago Tribune columnist felt students' pain. So, she decided to offer her own advice. In an attempt to sum up her life's lessons, Mary Schmich wrote a mock speech advising students, among other things: "Wear Sunscreen." After someone credited the speech to Kurt Vonnegut, it quickly gained fame on the Internet. Now, people call Schmich for advice before speaking at graduations.

"Until I wrote that, I never gave commencement speeches much thought," she said. "I just put myself in the place of the listener. The last thing I would want is to be instructed on some arcane topic."

"Inside every adult," she wrote in her 1997 column, "lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, some world-weary pundit eager to pontificate on life to young people who'd rather be Rollerblading."

Now that Schmich is one of the pundits, preparing for her first live graduation speech this week at a community college outside Chicago, she is trying to figure out how to rise above the pomp and circumstance to hold the attention of an antsy crowd of caps and gowns. Learning from the mistakes of others, she says, she'll talk to students directly, not as a generic crowd. Also, she hopes to impart some wisdom.

"Ideally, you want to give people some thoughts that they will take out of that room and carry with them the rest of their lives," she said. "It's just a thought or two that might come back to them on a hard day."

Unfortunately, many students have to suffer through long, abstract speeches that have little to do with celebrating their academic achievements. In protest, or out of boredom, large beach balls can often be found bouncing through the rows of seated graduates.

Garrison Keillor, the author, culture critic, and veteran commencement speaker, is harsh in his criticism.

He compares most speakers to a "small, dark cloud passing through" an otherwise joyous public occasion. And he believes "the large cheeses and gray eminences and gasbags who go around and get hooded" should stay home and leave the day to the graduates and their families.

"The function of the speaker is similar to that of the harpist at the wedding reception: It's not a performance, it's to provide atmosphere," he wrote in an e-mail. "About nine out of 10 speakers forget this, and what you get is an elephantine ego coming up and doing headstands. The audience is high as a kite and most speakers take the excitement personally and talk a little longer. They shouldn't."

Asked for his thoughts, Noam Chomsky, the outspoken MIT linguist, also responded in an e-mail: "I am often invited to give commencement speeches, but refuse when I can - sometimes it's uncomfortable to do so. It's not the sort of thing I like to do."

Whether students would rather be Rollerblading, or anywhere else not sweating under a June sun wearing a black gown, John C. Hoy, president of the New England Board of Higher Education, says commencement speakers have a duty to convey certain ideas.

"It's probably the last rite of passage that young Americans go through," said Hoy, also a commencement veteran. "It should welcome them into the mature society as full-blooded adults. The pitch should be: Life is more than making money, shouldn't be confined to a narrow specialization, and should be lived fully."

Beneath the neoclassical columns at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Friday, Carly S. Fiorina, the CEO of Hewlett Packard Co., delivered a version of that message.

But before stepping to the podium, she was careful to consult the graduates. After exchanging e-mails with scores of students, she said, she learned some wanted her to address the future of technology, women in the workplace, and the direction of Hewlett Packard, while others said they preferred she didn't discuss those subjects.

In the end, she said, the students made several things clear: "You wanted this address to be based on my life experience, not esoteric theory. You wanted to know the best way to make the decisions you'll need to live life . . . and on one point there was complete unanimity: Please don't run over your time."

At Hampshire College in Amherst last month, George Plimpton, editor of the "Paris Review" and veteran of more than 20 commencement speeches, delivered an itinerant speech, laden with humor, advice, and curious anecdotes about everything from the Earl of Chesterfield to the woes of the Red Sox.

"Maybe the best advice I've given," Plimpton said, "is telling students: ‘Go back to your rooms and unpack.’”

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Harvard 'Dream Team' Roiled

2005-05-17T20:32:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
Globe Staff
12/22/2001

Over the past decade, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has risen to stardom in academia and beyond by turning Harvard University's listless Afro-American studies department into a group so studded with star faculty that he fondly dubbed them his "Dream Team."

Now, six months after Lawrence H. Summers took over as president of Harvard, Gates and at least two other nationally known members of his department - Cornel West and Anthony Appiah - are considering leaving for Princeton University, according to senior black faculty members.

The reason is a falling out with Summers, who they say has acted abrasively toward many members of the faculty and criticized West for acting in ways unbecoming of a Harvard professor.

This week, West abruptly announced he would take a leave of absence, his second leave in two academic years.

In a phone interview yesterday, Summers said he didn't intend any offense. "It's a very unfortunate misunderstanding if my views have been perceived in other ways," he said.

According to interviews with more than a dozen faculty, staff, and administration officials, complaints about Summers began surfacing when he declined to make a strong statement in support of affirmative action at a meeting this summer with members of the Afro-American studies department.

After the semester began, other senior black professors began complaining that the new president had acted like "a bull in a china shop" and that he spoke dismissively of some professors, calling their ideas "stupid."

Others complained that Summers did not speak out in support of diversity and that he has not emphasized its importance as clearly as Harvard's recently retired president, Neil L. Rudenstine, who helped bring Gates to Harvard and build his team.

Gates declined to talk about the complaints from members of his faculty. Of his own plans, he said only: "I do not have an offer from Princeton."

He also said the departure of any members of the department would be a blow.

"It would be devastating to Harvard and the department of Afro-American studies, which Cornel and Anthony Appiah have helped to build brick by brick, for them to leave and go anywhere," said Gates, who took over as chairman in 1991, when the department consisted of only one white male professor and a small number of students.

This week, Gates and Appiah visited Princeton and met with the provost and other campus leaders, several sources at Harvard said. West, who spent years teaching at Princeton before Gates persuaded him to come to Harvard in 1994, did not make the trip, but has spoken to officials there, too, senior black faculty members said.

Reached on a cell phone yesterday, Appiah, a nationally respected philosopher who co-edited "Perseus Africana Encyclopedia" with Gates, said he preferred not to comment about his meetings. But of West's meeting with Summers, he said: "I don't think university presidents should lecture faculty on their political positions. If he did it, he shouldn't have."

In the meeting, according to senior faculty members who spoke with the Globe, Summers rebuked West for recording a rap CD, for leading a political committee for the Rev. Al Sharpton's possible presidential campaign, and for writing books more likely to be reviewed in The New York Times than in academic journals. He also reportedly criticized West for allowing grade inflation in his introductory course on black studies. Grade inflation has been a contentious issue this year at Harvard, which recently reported that nearly half of all grades given are A's.

West declined to be interviewed, and Summers - who insisted he supports affirmative action - said he wouldn't discuss a private conversation with a member of the faculty.

He said he believes "professors should be free to engage in any type of political activity they choose, that grade inflation is a general issue in the university that should be considered by faculty members in all departments with no specific focus, that many mediums of intellectual expression are appropriate and not for the university to judge, and that . . . public intellectual debate on many issues, including race, is a great strength of Harvard."

After hanging up, a senior administration official called the Globe and released this statement: "Summers views this very seriously and as a huge misunderstanding and is working extremely hard to keep each of these faculty members at Harvard."

The official added that Summers will "make certain that Harvard responds very aggressively to Princeton's challenge."

A spokesman for West - one of the first black scholars to be named a university professor, Harvard's highest faculty post and a designation held by only 14 of its 2,200 faculty members - also declined to speak about the specifics of the meeting between West and Summers. But he said the professor, who's scheduled to have surgery for prostate cancer next month, isn't taking a leave merely for health reasons.

"It would be a shame and a miscarriage of justice if for any reason Cornel were no longer at Harvard," said Charles J. Ogletree, a professor of law at Harvard who called West "my client in these matters." West is "a nationally respected scholar and a phenomenal teacher. . . . We hope that this is a place he will decide to spend the rest of his academic life."

Neither Ogletree nor other senior black faculty would say whether it's likely that West or other professors in the Afro-American studies department would choose to leave, but they acknowledged that the tensions have reached a boiling point.

Several faculty and staff members also said that word has gotten out and several universities have been calling senior black professors at Harvard and asking them to consider visiting their campuses. "If Harvard lets these people leave, and they don't make an all-out effort to keep them, I would really have to think about whether to stay," said one senior black professor.

Another senior black faculty member said: "People are willing to give a new president a grace period, but if in that time he acts like a bull in a china shop, it makes people very worried. It appears as if he has deliberately set himself on a collision course with faculty members."

Still, with the right statements and actions, other faculty members said Summers could keep the Dream Team at Harvard. Since Gates took over in 1991, the department has grown to 16 professors and has been immensely popular with students. West, the best-selling author of "Race Matters," teaches an introductory Afro-American studies course that's one of the most popular on campus, with more than 600 students enrolled this semester.

If Summers and the department can't come to terms, some faculty members might start brushing up their resumes.

"It is highly disturbing that things are so amiss here," said Randall Kennedy, a law professor. "That colleagues of mine may feel impelled to leave, it certainly raises anxieties."

David Abel can be reached by e-mail at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Being Cornel West

2005-05-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
Globe Staff
1/20/2002

He's the pre-eminent black intellectual of our time, admirers say, a peripatetic philosopher whose dissident wisdom was refined as much by his time at Harvard as by the angst of growing up a black man in a white-governed America.

To his critics, he's a charlatan in a three-piece suit, an academic poseur who speaks in grandiloquent tones that obfuscate more than illuminate.

Here's how he describes himself at the end of a recent book: "A dark voice that combines the blood-stained way of the cross in the funky Christianity of the spirituals with the tear-soaked tragicomic laughter in the funkier blues in order to enhance the art of wise living and enlarge the scope of democracy."

At 48, Cornel West has spent his life fighting for his ideas in academia and politics. Now the popular Harvard professor is waging a more personal battle - for his life and his reputation.

Over the past several months, West, who will have surgery for prostate cancer at the end of the month, has had his scholarship questioned by everyone from Harvard's new president, Lawrence H. Summers, to a growing chorus of conservative commentators. Some have even argued his distinction as one of only a few "university" professors at Harvard owes more to affirmative action than academic prowess.

The criticism has taken a toll. In recent weeks, the author of more than 20 books, a lecturer who gives more than 150 speeches in a year, and a philosopher so eager to spread his ideas that he recently recorded some riffs on a hip-hop CD, has become reclusive. He has granted only a few interviews and now frequently speaks through friends and colleagues. He declined comment for this story.

"This is the most difficult time in his life," said Charles J. Ogletree, a law professor at Harvard acting as a spokesman for West. "He has reached the pinnacle of his academic career, and it's amazing that he would face challenges at an institution he loves dearly. But he is resilient, and this too shall pass."

In October, West told colleagues that Summers called him to his office in Massachusetts Hall and offended him so much that the professor told colleagues he thought about quitting on the spot. Last month, West announced he was taking his second leave of absence in two years and that he's considering a long-standing offer to return to Princeton University, where he taught before coming to Harvard.

His possible departure, as well the potential exodus of other senior black professors who have rallied around West, has sparked an onslaught of news coverage - some harshly critical of West. The criticism has ranged from vituperative and racist talk-show rants to more thoughtful assaults on his scholarship.

"My question about Cornel is: What's his point?" said Shelby Steele, a noted black conservative author who in the Wall Street Journal recently called West an "academic lightweight."

"If you're at all objective about it, his weakness is obvious. There's no systematic thought, no thread, and a cacophony of ideas that aren't coherent. Cornel's work is not remotely on the same level as Nobel Prize winners, those who usually receive university professorships. The discrepancy is screaming," said Steele.

For a philosopher who says he "lingers on the night side of the human predicament," West insists he doesn't mind criticism of his work. It's the personal attacks he won't stand for.

In a recent interview on National Public Radio, West said Summers unfairly disparaged him in their meeting.

"I do not tolerate disrespect, being dishonored, and being devalued," he said. "I love to be criticized. Sometimes it's a little painful and hurtful. But when it comes to disrespect and being dishonored, it's the only thing one has as a human being, let alone as a black person in America."

West has long bridled at those who don't show him respect. When he was in the third grade growing up in suburban Sacramento, his teacher hit him for refusing to stand up and salute the flag with the rest of his class. The 9-year-old hit back, and the incident got him thrown out of school.

But it also set him on a path to Harvard. His dad, a civilian Air Force administrator, and his mom, an elementary school principal, encouraged West to steep himself in books - and he did. It was from a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate, that he first got the idea to apply to Harvard.

He entered Harvard in 1970 and graduated three years later - magna cum laude. One of his professors, Martin Kilson, recalls the Near Eastern studies major as "the most intellectually aggressive and highly cerebral student I have taught."

With a recommendation from Kilson, West was accepted to study for a doctorate in the renowned philosophy department at Princeton. The bright black student stood out in a sea of white students. He also stood out for the breadth of his reading, said Richard Rorty, a philosophy professor at Princeton at the time.

"He just read a lot more than most students and he was really the only one writing about political subjects," said Rorty, who favorably reviewed West's dissertation, "The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought."

After finishing his doctorate in 1980, West held teaching positions at Columbia and Yale, where he taught courses that touched on philosophy, religion, sociology, and history. In 1988, after publishing several books exploring connections between Christianity, Marxism, and the philosophical schools of existentialism and pragmatism, he returned to Princeton as a religion professor and chairman of the Afro-American studies program.

By the time he was 42, West had published 11 serious academic books and scholars were increasingly citing his work. He also had made a name for himself as a popular teacher whose spellbinding lectures would draw on a dizzying range of sources, from Erasmus and Nietzsche to Toni Morrison and John Coltrane.

In 1993, with the publication of "Race Matters," West made the leap from the academic world and achieved the rare status of a celebrity philosopher. The best-selling book, a collection of essays he wrote after the riots that followed the Rodney King trial, explained the roots and depths of racism in America and made West arguably America's best-known black intellectual.

Shortly after, Harvard snatched West from Princeton and in 1998 he became one of the first black scholars to be named a university professor - Harvard's highest distinction and a title held by only 14 of 2,200 faculty members. At the time, Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard's Afro-American studies department, called West "one of America's most important public intellectuals, and a formidable scholar by any measure."

Not everyone agreed.

"West's elevation to university professor was certainly controversial," said Glenn C. Loury, a university professor at Boston University and another black scholar who has frequently criticized West's work. "There was a lot of grousing. He had not yet established himself in the scholarly realm to deserve such a distinction at the time. If you were to take an objective look at Cornel's work as a philosopher, he clearly didn't break out and distance himself from the field."

Over the years, West has attracted similar critics, some from the left. In a 1995 cover story, the New Republic's literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, reviewed West's canon and called his work "almost completely worthless" on race issues and "noisy, tedious, slippery . . . humorless, pedantic, and self-endeared."

As more critics in the past weeks have pooh-poohed the professor's work, many colleagues have risen to his defense.

"This has been a very, very difficult time for Cornel," said William Julius Wilson, another university professor in Harvard's Afro-American studies department. "He's been the victim of blistering, ad hominem attacks . . . To call him a lightweight in view of his prodigious scholarship is just really dishonest."

Wilson also points to West's record as a teacher. In the fall, West had so many students enroll in his introductory Afro-American studies course he had to move it to a nearby church.

"He's the best teacher I've ever seen," said Martha Jane Nadell, the head teaching fellow for West's introductory course. "Students come up to me years after his class and say it was the best class they've ever taken at Harvard - and that it inspired them to think critically about race. What more could you want from a professor?"

To show their support, some students have recently hung posters around Harvard Yard telling the professor: "Harvard thanks you . . . We all feel that you have changed the Harvard community for the better."

As much as students beseech him to stay, West has hinted that he has already made his mind to leave Harvard for Princeton.

While his colleagues say he won't make any decision about his future until after the operation, he sounded in the interview on NPR as though he was already growing nostalgic.

"In a deep sense, I weep for Harvard, because Harvard has meant much to me," he said. "It's not simply a sense of turning away from Harvard . . .it's also a turning toward something that is positive, something that is visionary, something that is appreciative."

David Abel can be reached by e-mail at dabel@globe.com

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Shaking up Harvard

2005-05-17T20:27:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
Globe Staff
1/12/2002

Some recall a Socratic dialogue with him playing the devil's advocate; others remember him acting as a bully, holding firm to his views and scoffing at others' ideas.

At a law school dinner just a few weeks after Lawrence H. Summers took over as president of Harvard, he provoked a heated debate about age discrimination policy - arguing that it was fair to use age as a factor in awarding tenure and astonishing professors who hosted a friendly meeting to introduce him to some of the university's legal scholars.

"He seemed to regard that the way to get to know the faculty was to have an abstract debate, as opposed to just asking questions about the law school or politely inquiring about our research," one professor at the meeting said.

Summers, who recalls hoping to draw professors that night into a "vigorous intellectual conversation," arrived at Harvard with a reputation for being abrasive - and many on campus believe he has lived up to his reputation. Six months into a presidency that he promised would shake up the nation's premier university, Summers has had to temper his practice of playing intellectual provocateur and learn a new role: diplomat.

"I think it is important to avoid misunderstandings and to clear them up rapidly when they arise," said Summers in a phone interview. "I think one is reminded that it is always best to advance from areas of mutual interest."

In the past few weeks, Summers has come under pressure from both above and below for his blunt talk. Members of the Harvard Corporation, the university's governing board, admonished him for angering senior black scholars and for allowing a private meeting with the popular professor Cornel West to simmer into a public feud over how strongly the president supports diversity, university officials say.

While many at Harvard praise the new president's assertive, blunt style, he irked some on campus when he spoke out about patriotism and supporting the nation's military in wartime. He led some professors who study Latino issues to consider leaving after he rebuffed two proposals to create the campus's first center for Latino studies. Others recoiled at a lecture in the law school this fall when he called a question from a female law professor "stupid."

However, Summers has moved quickly to defuse campus controversies when they have gone public. He called the professor from the law school to apologize; he made a statement in support of diversity to appease concerned black and Latino professors; and he met with West last week to heal wounds from their previous meeting.

The president declined to discuss private conversations with professors and when asked why he has developed a reputation for harshness, he said, "I'm not going to speculate on others' judgments."

It has never been easy to be president of Harvard, a decentralized institution where much of the power rests with deans at the university's 10 schools. "It is no great surprise that assertive, envelope-stretching Harvard presidents run into faculty flak," said Morton Keller, a coauthor of the recently published "Making Harvard Modern."

He compared Summers's short term with the tensions that arose when, in the late 19th century, president Charles W. Elliot loosened up a rigid curriculum by allowing electives, or when James Bryant Conant in the 1930s transformed the admissions process into more of a merit system, and when Derek Bok two decades ago pressed the university to open more to minorities and women.

Unlike Summers's job in Washington, where he served as the Clinton administration's treasury secretary, Harvard's president can't simply fire dissident subordinates; he has to find common ground with the university's renowned academics, many of whom have large egos, differing interests, and lifetime appointments. He must also contend with students, a group of whom occupied the president's office last spring for nearly a month. The group plans protests this semester to pressure Summers to approve a "living wage" policy for the campus's lowest-paid workers. Last month, a committee established to end the sit-in concluded that Harvard's low-wage employees are earning less than a living wage.

"Every environment is different," Summers said, "but leadership is always about persuasion and the identification of mutual interest."

Fueling much of the tension on campus this fall has been the stark contrast in style between Summers and his predecessor, Neil L. Rudenstine, a low-key president who avoided personal conflicts and made a priority of building the university's Afro-American studies department.

"Neil had a soft approach," said Paul Grogan, Harvard's former vice president for public affairs, who left with Rudenstine in July. "He spent his entire life in the academy. He believed in academic collegiality and exercising leadership through quiet persuasion."

Summers has such a reputation for rubbing people the wrong way that it required help from friends including Robert E. Rubin, Summers's predecessor as treasury secretary, to persuade the university's presidential selection committee that his famously abrasive style was a part of the past.

But some professors and administrators insist he hasn't smoothed over his hard edge. "Rudenstine would say something is `complicated,' when he thought it was a bad idea," one senior administration official said. "Summers would say it is ‘outrageous and stupid,' when at first glance he thought, ‘This is a bad idea, but I'm willing to listen to a good argument.’”

While Rudenstine gently probed professors, the administrator said Summers asks questions and restates someone's position. "Then he smiles and refutes it," the official added. "It's this intellectual virtuoso performance that really makes people feel uncomfortable."

Some on campus may be put off by Summers's style, but others believe the new president's direct approach is what Harvard needs in an era of plenty, with many serious plans on the horizon. Summers has vowed to use the university's $18 billion endowment to revamp undergraduate education, hire hundreds of new professors, spread financial aid more evenly across the university's schools, bolster research in science and other disciplines, and oversee the growth of the campus in Allston.

"There are high expectations," said Jeremy Knowles, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. "What we have now is a change to someone who's more analytical and more questioning. But it's good for our time. If he doesn't ask hard questions, we'll just go on doing what we've always done."

The difference in Summers's approach is visible every month when the president and the deans meet. While Rudenstine would allow "the conversation to bubble up," said Joseph S. Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government, Summers "states a position sharply to play devil's advocate."

"Larry is more like a colleague. You can engage in a real exchange of ideas," said Robert C. Clark, law school dean. "He's more like a professor than a politician. And that's good. This is an academic institution and you have to be able to mix it up with professors."

Many on campus, however, believe Summers could benefit from the politesse practiced by his predecessor.

After pressing Summers to take a public stand on affirmative action and threatening to leave for Princeton University, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of the Afro-American studies department, emphasized if there's one lesson the president should have learned in the last six months, it's the need for more tact.

"One of the most important things that the president must realize is how fragile and insecure the egos of even the most senior faculty are - and always to manifest a sense of noblesse oblige in his dealings," he said.

Recalling the law school dinner, Summers - who, according to The Wall Street Journal, has denied at least two professors tenure because of their age - said by arguing against age discrimination policies he was just hoping to draw them out.

"It's certainly my way to participate vigorously in the intellectual life of the university," he said.

David Abel can be reached by e-mail at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

A Professor Disappears

2005-05-17T20:23:00.000-07:00

By David Abel and Ralph Ranalli
Globe Staff
12/02/2001

MEMPHIS - It was getting late and the well-dressed professor had switched from sipping port to ginger ale when he told a few of his colleagues how much he was looking forward to taking his wife and two young children to see where Elvis Presley lived.

The group of eminent scientists had retired to the piano bar from a penthouse banquet hall in The Peabody, a century-old hotel. As midnight approached on Nov. 15, Harvard biochemist Don C. Wiley was preparing to drive back to his father's home about 20 minutes away.

"He was very upbeat," recalls Patricia Donahoe, the chief of pediatric surgical services at Massachusetts General Hospital and an old friend of Wiley's who chatted with him about 10:30 that night. "He was his normal, even-tempered self, and he was happy his family was coming in."

But Wiley, one of the nation's foremost experts on the way viruses such as HIV, influenza, and Ebola become deadly infectious diseases, never got to take his family to Graceland. He never even made it back to his father's.

Instead, the lanky 57-year-old professor vanished. At 4 a.m., police found Wiley's rental car abandoned on a mile-long bridge that spans the Mississippi River, with his rental-car contract in the glove compartment, the keys in the ignition, and a full tank of gas.

Two weeks later, police here say they have no clue what happened to him. Speculation abounds about the fate of the man colleagues say was doing work that could make him a candidate for a Nobel prize. But after more than a dozen Globe interviews with family, colleagues, and police, every theory seems to have serious flaws.

Since his car was parked in a traffic lane without any signs of a struggle and on a bridge where others have jumped, some investigators surmise Wiley killed himself. Yet family and friends insist the father of four and granddad of three is just not the type to commit suicide: He's exuberant about his work and was nearing a breakthrough in a molecular understanding of HIV that could help develop an AIDS vaccine.

While it's possible he was mugged or abducted, police and local criminologists say the downtown area around the Peabody is heavily patrolled and the safest part of Memphis. And both police and colleagues say Wiley has no scientific knowledge that would benefit bioterrorists, making it absurd to suggest he was kidnapped for his expertise.

"At this point, it could really be anything," says Lieutenant Richard True, a spokesman for the Memphis Police Department.

Wiley had come to Memphis on Wednesday Nov. 14 to attend a two-day annual meeting of the scientific advisory board of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, on which he has served for about a decade.

He had flown in from Washington, where he went that Sunday to attend meetings for several days at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md. The institute has long sponsored much of his research. At the Memphis airport, he rented a white 2001 Mitsubishi Gallant from Avis and drove for about 20 minutes to his 82-year-old father's ranch home in Raleigh, a quiet residential neighborhood in north Memphis.

It was late in the afternoon and the professor's father, William C. Wiley, says that his son seemed in good spirits. The two caught up for a while and the professor called his wife in Cambridge to let her know he had arrived and to find out what time he should meet her and their two children Lara, 7, and William, 10, at the airport that Friday.

Wiley's wife had already bought four tickets to visit Graceland. The couple's son, William, is a budding Elvis fan. The professor and the boy have a close relationship, and Wiley was eager to finally take him to Graceland.

"There was nothing out of the ordinary," says Wiley's wife, Katrin Valgeirsdottir, about their last conversation at 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 14. "We talked about where we were going for dinner on Friday night, and how I should talk to his dad about finding a nice place to eat. He sounded happy to see his dad."

Wiley left his father's house soon after for a dinner meeting at the Peabody Hotel with members of St. Jude's scientific advisory board, a group of high-profile scientists serving the nation's largest childhood cancer center. One board member, Leland Hartwell of Seattle, for example, was recently awarded the Nobel prize in Medicine. And Wiley, who colleagues say has a strong shot at the Nobel for his work using X-ray crystallography and complex mathematical formulas to diagram viruses, has received the prestigious Lasker and Japan awards.

The reserved professor greeted his colleagues that night with the same subdued but warm embrace they had come to expect from him. He inquired about the families of some and the progress of others' research. After finishing business for the night, Wiley and a few colleagues walked across the street to the Rendezvous, a rib joint that is perhaps Memphis' most famous barbeque restaurant.

"All I can really say is that he was definitely engaged," says Marvin Zelen, a board member who's a professor of statistical science at Harvard School of Public Health.

After dinner, Wiley returned to his father's home. The next morning he was up early and drove to the sprawling campus of St. Jude's to meet the board for a 7:30 breakfast.

His mission that morning was to review the hospital's structural biology department, which Wiley played a key role in founding. The professor toured the high-tech facilities and at times marveled to some of the department's 46 staff members that St. Jude's often received the latest scientific equipment before Harvard.

Later, in a formal review in front of the advisory board, Wiley delivered a report that praised the progress of the department's researchers in paring diseases down to their molecular level and making discoveries that might soon help treat a variety of infectious diseases.

"He asked a lot of technical questions and he was very thorough," recalls Larry J. Shapiro, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School and a board member who reviewed the structural biology department with Wiley. "I saw nothing at all to say he was disturbed, agitated, uneasy, or anything atypical."

When the board meeting wrapped up late in the afternoon, Wiley drove back to his dad's house. Around 5 p.m., the professor's father returned home from a few errands and found a note telling him his son was out for a 5-mile run and would be back soon.

When Wiley returned from the run, his youngest brother, Greg, who also lives in Memphis, popped in for a short visit. "We just shot the bull," says Greg Wiley, recalling the last time he saw his brother.

The professor showered, shaved, and just before 7 p.m. he zipped back to the Peabody Hotel for the banquet in honor of the visiting scientists. Wiley was wearing a black suit he had bought in 1999 when the emperor and prime minister of Japan awarded him their country's top science prize for his work showing how the immune system fights infections.

The formal gathering in the Peabody's penthouse included about 150 doctors, researchers, and administrators from St. Jude's. Several colleagues remember talking to Wiley that night about how he took his son sailing and his family's plans for the weekend.

"He was in great spirits," says Samuel L. Katz, a professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases at Duke University Medical Center who also serves on the hospital's advisory board.

Dinner ended about 10 p.m. and Wiley and several colleagues decided to hang around for a while in the hotel's lobby. After nursing a glass of port for about an hour, the professor switched to soda and told Patricia Donahoe and others about his plans to take his family to Graceland.

Although he had a room reserved for him at the hotel, Wiley told his remaining colleagues around midnight he was heading back to his father's house and he would see them the next day.

It was the last time anyone saw him.

The next four hours are a mystery.

About 3:45 a.m., the first calls started ringing at the police department. A white car pointing west in the direction of Arkansas was blocking a traffic lane on the narrow bridge. Patrol cars arrived a few minutes later and found the empty car.

Other than a missing hubcap on the right front wheel and yellow scrape marks on the Mitsubishi Gallant's front bumper, the car looked like it just came from the showroom. Police say they have no idea if the marks and missing hubcap were on the car before that Friday morning.

Harvard and St. Jude's announced a $10,000 reward this week for any information that helps find Wiley, and police say they have received a few tips since then. But investigators acknowledge they are no closer to finding him today than they were more than two weeks ago.

"The case remains a mystery," says Lieutenant Richard True. "He's still classified as a missing person. There's always hope."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Porn Studies

2005-05-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
Globe Staff
8/20/2001

Richard Burt, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and host of a provocative Web site, teaches his students about the modern adaptations of Shakespeare, often focusing on a growing number of porn flicks invoking the Bard.

For the past five years, Henry Jenkins, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, has asked his class to analyze photos from Hustler magazine and clips from blue movies such as "Deep Throat."

And Hope Weissman, a women's studies professor at Wesleyan University, has required students in her class, "Pornography: Writing of Prostitutes," to produce a work of pornography for their final project.

The three professors are part of a growing movement on college campuses that is testing the bounds of academic freedom by introducing pornography into the classroom. The small but thriving community of professors treats pornography - an industry on which Americans each year spend billions of dollars - as a serious subject for academic inquiry.

Many of the professors shun attention. But others who have written extensively about pornography and teach it in their classes eagerly explain why they are attracted to porn studies.

"To not study pornography is to ignore an absolutely pervasive phenomenon in our culture," said Linda Williams, a film studies professor at the University of California in Berkeley who helped pioneer porn studies with her book, "Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible."

"Hollywood makes about 400 films a year; the porn industry makes 9,000 to 11,000 titles. That means an enormous number of people across the board are watching pornography. It's not just dirty old men."

Courses on pornography are now offered at schools such as Emerson College, New York University, Northwestern University, Arizona State University, and several campuses in the University of California system. Professors invite porn stars to lecture on such subjects as improving the working conditions of sex workers.

The scholarship is growing, too, professors say. Respected journals such as The Quarterly Review of Film Studies and Human Sexuality are publishing more and more papers on pornography. And academics are increasingly writing books with titles such as "Erotic Faculties" by an art historian at the University of Nevada at Reno and "Porn 101" by a sociology professor at the University of California at Northridge.

There was even an academic forum organized in Los Angeles called the World Pornography Conference, which in 1998 drew professors in fields including sociology, philosophy, English, and film studies.

Many, such as Constance Penley, a film studies professor who runs UC Santa Barbara's Pornography Research Focus Group, attended to spread understanding of their work. But some also went to rebut such critics as Catherine MacKinnon, a University of Michigan Law School professor who argues that pornography exploits women and desensitizes men to sexual violence, and Pat Robertson, who once called Penley's class on pornography "a new low in humanist excess."

"There have been many protests, but pornography has been taught for years, in medical schools, psychology and sociology departments," said Penley.

"What upset people, in my case, is that I study pornography to see what it consists of, not debating whether it is art or deviant. I also teach it as another genre of film, like Westerns or science fiction."

Today, porn-studies professors say, there is less resistance to and outrage about their work, due in part to the flourishing of pornography on home videos, cable, and the Internet.

The study of pornography on campuses emerged about a decade ago, professors say, partly in reaction to the growth of a porn industry that some say nets as much as $14 billion a year, but also as part of a growing movement in academia to study popular culture, gender, and women's issues.

In fact, most who teach in the field are women. Many of them echo the arguments of Laura Kipnis, a professor of media studies at Northwestern University, who argues that pornography, in the right context, is liberating.

"It's about removing the stigma and understanding the taboo," said Kipnis, author of "(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler."

Men, however, still face some stigma in teaching pornography. While Jenkins of MIT says he never had any student complain, Peter Lehman, a humanities professor at Arizona State University, once had a printing shop refuse to copy his course packet. Now, Lehman requires all students who take his class on "Sexuality in the Media" to sign a consent form.

"It's to prevent possible harassment charges," said Lehman, who has cochaired workshops on porn-pedagogy and is editing an anthology of pornography for college classes. "I don't want any students to be surprised."

Resistance to pornography in the classroom also affects female professors. In 1999, Wesleyan's president launched a review of Weissman's class, and for years antiporn activists have targeted attention-getting professors such as Penley for protest.

At UMass-Amherst, administrators last year pressured Burt to take down his campus Web site, which featured pictures of bare-chested strippers straddling his lap and of his wife dressed as a porn star. Administrators argued that the site violated UMass's acceptable-use policy for information technology.

A year later, however, the author of books such as "Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares" has moved the Web site to a commercial server and added content, mixing links to porn sites and interviews with adult-film directors with descriptions of his classes and their syllabuses.

For Burt and most others in the field, porn studies is merely a natural extension of their work.

"If you're going to think about Shakespeare adaptations, which is something that I think about," he says in an article posted on his Web site, "then why not Shakespeare porn? It's one kind of adaptation. It's a phenomenon, it's out there, it's part of the culture, so why not study it?"

David Abel can be reached by e-mail at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Can-do Parents

2005-05-17T20:19:00.000-07:00

By David Abel and Lynda Gorov
Globe Staff
3/03/2001

CAMBRIDGE - Every month, his hard-working parents send Rogelio Garcia Jr. about $200 in walking-around money.

It doesn't sound like much, but the 20-year-old junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has an inherited knack for making a little bit stretch a long way.

The credit goes to his parents, Yolanda and Rogelio Garcia, who live in a cramped one-bedroom Los Angeles apartment and also support a daughter at the University of California and a son in high school.

Often starting after midnight and working 14 hours every day, rain or shine, Rogelio's father steers his old white truck through the back alleys of Los Angeles neighborhoods so he and his wife can gather thousands of cans.

"We're working 365 days a year," said Rogelio Sr., 53, a quiet, skinny native of Oaxaca, Mexico. "There's no rest."

For more than a decade, the couple has vied with other foragers to collect about 45,000 cans a month, earning them on average between $1,400 and $1,600.

Not a penny is wasted. What doesn't go toward food, gas, and rent goes to their 19-year-old daughter, Adriana, at UC Riverside, and to Rogelio Jr. at MIT.

Their son works just as hard as his parents. In Cambridge - a city so far from home his parents thought they needed passports to visit - the bespectacled student stays up until 2 a.m. almost every day, amassing a different kind of wealth: studying aeronautical engineering and laying the foundation for a career that may soon allow his parents to retire.

"My parents always said, `Work hard, keep studying, and don't worry about the money,' " he said. "They always told me that I could do anything I wanted if I worked hard."

His parents grew up together in the same small town in Mexico. His father worked as a baker and made Oaxacan-style jewelry; his mother worked as a government secretary. The two later met and married in Los Angeles, after both took separate buses to the border and illegally dashed into the United States on foot.

They moved to an unincorporated section of Los Angeles called Venice, and both worked odd jobs. Rogelio found work as a restaurant dishwasher and meat cutter, earning as much as $9 an hour. Yolanda also worked various jobs, including one paying $7 an hour making pens at a factory.

Things went well until 1985, when Yolanda was laid off. That's when she got the idea to collect cans. Seven years later, also laid off from his job, Rogelio joined his wife's expeditions.

The work - arduous, demeaning, and sometimes risky - has never been ideal, and they must work hard to beat their competition to the quarry.

The first time Yolanda stuck her hand into a Dumpster she wasn't sure the money was worth the work. "I felt horrible," said Yolanda, 51, a small woman with callused hands and a bright smile that exposes her missing front teeth.

But the couple never lost sight of the goal. They didn't accept welfare, believing it would block Rogelio Jr., Adriana, and their 14-year-old son, Angel, from qualifying for financial aid. They also mistakenly believed that accepting public assistance would harm their chances for citizenship, which they eventually gained.

On one point, however, they didn't err. Their firstborn, Rogelio Jr., had a gift. From elementary school, it was clear he had a knack for math and science. The problem was making sure that their son didn't turn away from his talents and give in to the cruelty of his peers, who frequently teased him.

"He was always at the books, never in the streets, never running wild with friends," his father said.

On weekends, after finishing his homework, Rogelio Jr. would sometimes spend the day with his parents collecting cans. He would watch his father fetch a battered bicycle from his truck, which his mother would ride from one Dumpster to another. If at first he was embarrassed and kept his parents' occupation a secret from his friends, Rogelio learned to live with it.

"Kids could be very cruel, and the emotional stress was sometimes unbearable," he said. "But I got over it. I knew what my parents were doing, and why."

Though his parents pushed him, Rogelio needed little motivation. As a freshman in high school, he glimpsed his ticket out of poverty when a senior became the first student in his school to be accepted at MIT.

"It was really huge news that someone from Venice got into MIT," he recalled. "No one really knew where it was or what it was."

The odds of an impoverished Los Angeles Latino getting a coveted spot at the nation's top technical college improved when Rogelio Jr. aced his SATs. But even with high scores and a grade point average surpassing perfection - including advanced placement courses he had a 4.2 GPA - he doubted he would be accepted.

The competition was one obstacle; the price was another. The $33,000 annual tuition is more than twice his family's annual income.

Rogelio Jr. sent applications not only to MIT but also to Princeton, the California Institute of Technology, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Carle ton College in Minnesota. In March of his senior year, he hadn't heard from any of them.

He was starting to despair when MIT called and accepted him. "I was like, `Who is this? Don't joke with me,' " he recalled.

MIT's generous package of grants, work-study, and low-interest loans didn't guarantee an easy life. Even with the $200 his parents sent him each month, he often lived on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and had to save enough money from his job working at an MIT lab to buy a winter coat.

The stress wasn't just about money. A child prodigy back home, at MIT Rogelio struggled to maintain a B average.

"My first year here was incredibly difficult," he said. "I didn't think I would make it."

Nearly three years later, lugging a large sack of books and wearing baggy blue jeans, black clunkers, and trendy, oval glasses, Rogelio is comfortable in Cambridge and indistinguishable from other college students.

The MIT upperclassman is over the hump. Though he still struggles with his humanities classes, he hopes to work soon for a company like Raytheon, where he can help build spacecraft equipment.

His parents will visit for the first time when he graduates in a year-and-a-half.

"I miss my family a lot," he said. "But I know they are very happy for me."

On a recent day in Venice, Yolanda Garcia was welcomed at a hotel where the Garcias are known and respected. An employee hauled out five large bags filled with trash. Meticulously, she sifted through each one, grabbing a bottle here, a can there.

The yield: perhaps a dozen bottles and cans. She wiped them clean, packed them in her own bags, piled them in her bike basket, and rode away.

After a few hours poking through Dumpsters, the small woman wearing three layers of sweatshirts and a red knit cap pulled low to protect her against the cold and the rain wasn't complaining. With her son at MIT, her daughter doing well, and her other son primed for success, she declared, "It's the American dream."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Follow-up story:
A LABOR OF LOVE IS REWARDED

By David Abel
Globe Staff
6/08/2002

CAMBRIDGE - The plane was leaving at 7 a.m., and because the car taking them to the airport wouldn't come until 5, they figured they had enough time to fit in a night shift. So, like every other night of the year, Rogelio and Yolanda Garcia piled into their old white truck and went to work collecting cans in the back alleys of Los Angeles.

When dawn broke, it would herald a day like no other in their lives, one they never envisioned before leaving their small town in Mexico more than two decades ago.

After four years of hearing about the domed buildings along the banks of a river in a cold and faraway city, they would see them for the first time. Their son, a child prodigy they pampered as best they could, though they had next to nothing, would become the family's first college graduate, and not just from any college, but from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Yesterday, the Garcias, who gained national attention by collecting hundreds of thousands of cans over the years to help pay for their three children's education, watched as their oldest son, Rogelio Jr., graduated in style, pulling straight A's in his final semester and landing a lucrative job as an engineer.

"I never had any doubts he would do it," said his father, beaming despite the downpour and bitter wind that drenched the more than 2,000 graduates in ponchos and mortarboards yesterday on MIT's Killian Court. "We, of course, are very proud of him."

Other than a brief trip to Miami last year, courtesy of a TV station, yesterday was the couple's first day off in as long as they can remember - perhaps since 1985 when Yolanda began fishing through dumpsters.

Despite their joy at seeing Rogelio Jr. graduate after four years of pinching pennies, living off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and spending countless all-nighters cramming for classes that at first seemed impossibly demanding, the couple didn't have time to rest on their laurels. They had work to do.

Although their airfare and hotel bill was covered by alumni, the Garcias, who brought their two younger children, Angel, 15, and Adriana, a 20-year-old junior at the University of California at Riverside, were trying to make arrangements to return last night, a day ahead of schedule.

"Saturday is our best day," said Yolanda, a tiny 52-year-old whose smile glows brightly against dark cheeks tanned from so many years toiling under the California sun.

National publicity about their story has helped the Garcias financially over the past two years, but it has also hurt them, the couple says. That they could earn as much as $1,600 by collecting some 45,000 cans a month invited copycats - and the competition has significantly cut into their profits.

They also say they took a financial hit after Sept. 11. With fewer tourists visiting LA, fewer parties, and the hotels half-empty, they say the number of cans, bottles, and plastic redeemables fell.

So, in February, the city offered the couple a part-time job cleaning Venice Beach - near the cramped one-bedroom apartment they called home until moving recently to a larger place in what they describe as a "less noisy" part of the city.

The new job is good because it has allowed them to continue collecting cans - and to double their income to about $2,800 a month. The two continue cruising in their truck and collecting cans after midnight, but now, Monday through Friday, Yolanda leaves for the beach at 6 a.m. while her husband continues collecting cans. At 10 a.m., Rogelio, a slight, 5-foot-tall 54-year-old, takes over at the beach and his wife returns to collecting cans. At 2 p.m. on weekdays, the two meet up again and spend a few more hours working the alleys together.

"The good part is that the money is assured," Rogelio said. "But collecting cans is a job for life - we're our own bosses, there are no punch cards, and we can continue doing it as long as we like."

With Rogelio Jr. coming home to work for Raytheon, getting paid $60,000 a year - more than three times what his parents earn collecting cans - the ebullient 21-year-old, who yesterday completed a degree in aeronautical engineering, hopes his parents will let him do the family's heavy lifting. But with $25,000 in debt, his sister still in school, and his brother two years away from college, the couple insist they won't let up much.

"We might reduce our hours a little," said Yolanda, who bought a new dress for yesterday's commencement, "but working is a part of our lives. If we stopped, I'm afraid we would die."

Huddling in ponchos and sitting in the frigid rain from early morning until the afternoon, the Garcias weren't in the mood to complain. Nor were they bothered by about 100 protesters who came to show their anger at the day's keynote speaker, James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank Group, who spoke about rising poverty throughout the world.

When their son found them among the throngs of parents at commencement, Yolanda and Rogelio looked at him with his new haircut and in his cap and gown, smiled, and then smothered him with hugs.

"This is really a great day," Yolanda said. "We couldn't be any more proud."

Anguish at MIT

2005-05-17T20:16:00.000-07:00

By David Abel and Daryl Khan
Globe Correspondents
5/21/2000

LIVINGSTON, N.J. - Not long before MIT sophomore Elizabeth Shin set herself ablaze in her dormitory room April 10, classmates say, she had shown signs of distress, sometimes sobbing so loudly she kept other students awake.

The 19-year-old, known as much for her intellectual promise as her musical grace, was prescribed an antidepressant by the school's clinic and had been persuaded to start an outpatient mental therapy program.

But no one from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Elizabeth's family in New Jersey.

A month has passed and Cho Hyun and Kisuk Shin are still bristling with anger. The anguish of losing their firstborn has only increased as a result of what the Shins describe as a bureaucratic deafness to their appeal for information from MIT, police, and fire investigators.

"This extreme way," said Kisuk Shin, pausing to swallow, tears welling in her eyes. "It's just not Elizabeth. It's not her. It's not her at all . . ."

"It doesn't seem real to us," her husband said.

The couple want an autopsy report, conclusions from the police investigation, and a more satisfying explanation from MIT health officials about what caused the fire that left third-degree burns covering more than 65 percent of Elizabeth's body.

For MIT, the tragedy puts its officials on the defensive again - it is the university's third suicide this year and the fifth since 1998 - and forces them to confront difficult moral and legal issues involving students' rights of privacy as adults vs. parental rights to know about their children's well-being.

"The difficulty in this case is that [Elizabeth] clearly didn't want her parents involved - that was one of her specific concerns," said Robert Randolph, senior associate dean of students. "The question we have been reviewing is whether we should specifically counter the wishes of individuals."

Until the investigation is complete, the Shins say, they prefer to believe Elizabeth's attempts to kill herself were a cry for help gone terribly wrong, a self-inflicted injury that never received the proper medical attention. And while they spent the day before the fire with Elizabeth and saw nothing amiss, her parents say the signs were posted clearly enough for someone at MIT to have saved their daughter - or at least to have alerted them to intervene.

"Elizabeth could have been saved, and that's what makes us so angry," Kisuk said.

Cho Hyun added: "If parents are kept blind because of no communication between the school and parents, and the school's not doing a full-fledged job by taking care of students, then there's a chance of an instance like this repeating."

Because of confidentiality laws, MIT was not required to notify the Shins about Elizabeth's condition. But, in similar cases, according to Randolph, the school has notified parents. "The decision is made on a case-by-case basis," he said.

The housemaster of Elizabeth's dorm, Nina Davis-Millis, did call the family three weeks before the fire. She told them she had taken Elizabeth to the school's infirmary, the Shins said, but did not tell them it was because of self-inflicted cuts on her upper arm. Further, in the days before the fire, when Elizabeth could be heard screaming suicide threats in her dorm and was again taken to the infirmary, no one called the parents.

The Shins also never learned their daughter had agreed to start therapy. The treatment was set to begin the day after the fire.

"I have to confess that I have lost a huge amount of sleep over this, thinking about what I said and what I did," said Davis-Millis, who was a surrogate mother to Elizabeth as the adult supervisor of Random Hall's 93 students. "But, in the end, I feel I did everything I could."

Davis-Millis, who has worked as a librarian at MIT since 1985 and has been a housemaster for the past five years, knows well the rigors of MIT. Students, many of whom were at the top of their high school classes, have to learn to live with the stiffer competition and higher standards of one of the world's elite technical universities.

But she says she believes the best way for students to learn how to handle the pressure is for them to be treated as adults. If Elizabeth didn't want her parents to know that MIT doctors prescribed her the antidepressant Celexa, that was her choice, Davis-Millis said.

"Of course, there are risks and ethical dilemmas," she said. "But I admire our system. It treats students like the adults that they are."

Cho Hyun Shin disagrees.

"The age when they leave for school is 18 and up, but still they are not fully mature persons," he said. "They're still a child in a sense."

Elizabeth's death followed two other suicides this year: In March, Chris Milliard, a 24-year-old MIT graduate, leapt to his death from Phi Beta Epsilon fraternity house where he was living, and in February, Seth Karon, who had been on a leave of absence from MIT, committed suicide at his home in Plymouth, Minn.

School officials, however, assert that suicide is no more of a problem at MIT than at other campuses. Moreover, they say, the rate has declined significantly since peaks during the 1960s and 1970s. In the past 36 years, they say, there have been approximately 38 suicides, which would put MIT below the national average.

A survey by Katharyn Jeffries, an MIT junior who researched suicides for the campus newspaper, The Tech, found 21.2 suicides for every 100,000 undergraduate student years, a figure used to compare suicide rates among different populations. Her figures include students on leaves of absence. The national average among all people between the ages of 20 and 24, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, is about one-third lower than the undergrad figure, or 13.6 per 100,000.

Despite her many strengths, anyone who knew Elizabeth knew she was in a funk, including her parents. Only a month before the fire, she and her boyfriend of the past several months had broken up.

Kisuk Shin knew Elizabeth was suffering from insomnia. She would call her mother every other night, but the week before the fire, the calls stopped.

Another sign of Elizabeth's inner struggle could have been apparent the year before. During fi nals as a freshman, she overdosed on cold medicine and was taken to McLean Hospital in Belmont. It is not clear whether she had been attempting suicide, Cho-Hyun Shin said. Elizabeth told her parents she had trouble sleeping and accidentally took too many pills.

At the same time, Elizabeth's successes helped mask her inner turmoil, friends say.

She was a salutatorian of West Orange High School who turned down Yale for MIT, a gifted clarinet player who once performed in a duet at New York's Lincoln Center, and a biology major aspiring to become a genetics researcher after a stint in the Peace Corps.

Now, the parents are left with many questions: If suicide was on her mind, why would she arrange to take a summer job at one of MIT's genetic labs? Why would she continue with classes, maintaining high grades? Why would she bother to keep appointments in her date book, weeks in advance of April 10, the night police found her in a bed engulfed in flames?

Adding to her parents' bewilderment, the couple had flown to Boston and spent a lazy Sunday afternoon with Elizabeth the day before the fire. Everything seemed fine. They went shopping for juice and bottled water, helped her hook up her new television and VCR, and had a quiet dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge.

Later that night, after the Shins returned on a shuttle flight to New Jersey, Elizabeth had a session with her clarinet teacher in which she played beautifully, the teacher said, exhibiting the elegant precision and measured exuberance that had earned her a spot on the All-East Orchestra, a coveted honor for high school musicians across the Northeast.

There also appears to have been avenues for her to seek help.

According to a dorm neighbor, Jim Paris, there was no shortage of people willing to help Elizabeth. "A lot of people were trying to help her," he said. "Help was forthcoming; it just wasn't accepted."

Indeed, MIT has a sophisticated support network - which includes 24-hour student-run telephone hot lines, a cadre of psychiatrists on call, and educational awareness programs. Still, the school is reviewing whether there is anything additional that can be done, said MIT spokesman Ken Campbell.

Although in hindsight he wishes MIT did more to help Elizabeth, he said there is only so much that could have been done. "You can try to save kids," he said, "but you can't save them all."

At their home in this Newark suburb, the Shins' fond memories of Elizabeth are still clouded with bitterness toward MIT.

As Kisuk, 47, cleans up a carry-out Chinese dinner, Cho Hyun, 50, leans back in his chair and talks about his morning commute.

There is a patch of grass, he said, just past a toll plaza along the New Jersey Turnpike. This morning he noticed a colony of Canada geese marching along the grass - two geese in front, their goslings waddling behind. On they marched: two geese, goslings, two geese, goslings. Parents followed by their children. Except for two. Two geese, he said, had no goslings.

"Something must have happened to them," Cho Hyun said. "Some kind of accident . . ."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

A Physicist Fights the Powerful

2005-05-17T20:13:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
GLOBE STAFF
6/12/2000

CAMBRIDGE - A loud, hammering voice seeps out of the small office, and the gray-bearded man shouting into the phone won't let his point escape the caller: "I'm talking about scientific fraud, government waste, and the abuse of power."

From behind the clutter of model rockets and dog-eared scientific manuals devouring his desk, one of the nation's leading dissidents of pricey Pentagon programs slides back in his chair and sips from a mug inscribed with a message, "Back off Man! I'm a Scientist."

Nearly a decade ago, Theodore A. Postol, MIT physicist, missile expert, and professor of national security studies, gained acclaim in scientific circles and disdain in the Defense Department after debunking the "success" of Raytheon Corp.'s Patriot missile during the Gulf War. His analysis prompted the Army and Raytheon to reduce Patriot's claimed success rate by half and many to question whether the defensive weapon left more damage than Iraq's Scud missiles.

Now, Postol, once one of the military's top scientific advisers, is at it again. He believes he has the facts to prove that the $60 billion program to shoot down hostile missiles launched against the United States has a critical flaw: It won't work.

In the process, Postol may have helped redefine the intelligentsia's role in forming the nation's foreign policy. At last week's summit in Moscow, Russian president Vladimir Putin appeared to adopt a plan proposed by Postol that could substantially alter the terms of a US national missile defense, prevent another arms race with Russia or China, and maintain a cornerstone arms treaty ensuring the balance of power.

"If this isn't scientific fraud, I don't know what is," he said. "And it's bad government. If I'm wrong, they should discredit me. They should show that I don't know what I'm talking about. But they can't."

Last month, Postol made headlines after a letter he wrote to the White House detailed potential pitfalls in the administration's missile-defense plan and exposed what he believes is evidence of a cover-up. Furthering his suspicions, the White house turned his letter over to the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Office, which promptly classified Postol's findings as secret, even though the letter had already been published on Russian Web sites.

The 54-year-old professor, a scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the 1980s who helped develop the Trident 2 missile, believes current technology is nowhere close to discriminating between a potential enemy's decoys and nuclear warheads. A few balloons, he says, might be sufficient to fool the current or future crop of antimissiles.

The proof, Postol says, was recently revealed by a lawsuit filed by Nira Schwartz against her former employer, the military contractor TRW. Schwartz, a senior TRW engineer, contends that the contractor fired her after she uncovered fraudulent performance reports. TRW, contracted by Boeing Co. to build the "kill vehicle" (the antimissile's 120-pound homing device), denies the allegations.

According to his analysis of documents from the lawsuit, Postol says TRW's own flight-test data found the decoys and warheads indistinguishable. Moreover, Postol now believes the Pentagon is rigging the tests to ensure success. After a 1997 test of the antimissile revealed it couldn't effectively distinguish decoys from warheads, he says, the Pentagon stopped using decoys that could seriously challenge the interceptor.

In the draft of another letter he plans to send to Clinton administration officials, Postol says that other government documents he obtained prove the ballistic-missile office has significantly reduced the difficulty of the next 14 tests planned before the antimissile would be deployed in 2005.

Pentagon officials have yet to respond to the specific allegations of fraud Postol detailed in his May letter to the White House. But they dismiss his criticism as based on limited and old data and on plans still in the making.

"Dr. Postol is not considering all the capabilities of what we call our `system of systems,"' said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon's National Missile Defense program. "The information on which he bases his claims is incomplete and his conclusions are wrong."

Lehrer believes Postol's analysis doesn't account for the role advanced radars would play in ferreting warheads from decoys. And the most up-to-date kill vehicle, a weapon designed by Raytheon, uses more advanced technology than the one TRW built for Boeing, which lost the contract competition.

But neither Lehrer nor other Pentagon officials would explain the technological differences. "For obvious security reasons, we can't discuss the capability of the system," he said. "There's absolutely no way to get into great detail without spilling the beans to potential adversaries."

As more information leaks out of the Pentagon, those words sound like a cover-up to many scientists.

"It's just another whitewash," said Schwartz, who has joined Postol and others in calling for a board of independent scientists to review the data before President Clinton decides whether to deploy the system. "The mathematical tools used to process the data will not make a miracle. Math is just a tool, not magic. Right now, there's no way to differentiate the decoys."

In the fall, relying on Pentagon reports, the president will decide whether to proceed with the Pentagon's plans for a limited national missile defense, a system of at least 100 interceptors based in Alaska.

Yet, the decision relies on more than science. Democrats, long pigeonholed by Republicans as "wimps" on defense, know they risk appearing weak in an election year if they don't press on. For their part, most Republicans - including George W. Bush - believe the United States should field a more extensive national missile defense than the Clinton administration's. They want space-based and sea-based weapons in addition to the Alaska interceptors.

"Ted is evidently in the business of telling the emperor he has no clothes; unfortunately, the facts haven't penetrated Washington circles," said John Pike, director of space policy and military analysis at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. "It's kind of dreadful to contemplate what's technically possible and politically acceptable."

Postol is not against the Clinton administration's missile-defense plan just because he believes it won't work. As it stands, he and many others fear the plan could lead to a new arms race with Russia and China, deflect taxpayer money from more important projects, and wreck plans to further reduce still plentiful stocks of Russian and US nuclear weapons.

And like other analysts, Postol also questions the threat of a "rogue" nation such as North Korea, Iran, or Libya amassing the technical know-how to launch a nuclear missile against the United States. "It's ludicrous to postulate such a threat from such small, underdeveloped countries," he said.

But if such a threat does arise - a 1998 commission of experts led by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld concluded North Korea and Iran could develop intercontinental ballistic missiles within five years - Postol believes there's a less expensive and more assured defense.

And it's also palatable to Russia.

The "boost-phase" idea, endorsed last week by Putin, would station antimissile-carrying warships in the waters near a hostile country. If the country launched a ballistic missile, the warships would be in a position to knock it out of the sky before the missile left the region.

"Most scientists agree that this is really the only defense that's feasible," said Robert Park, a physicist and executive director of the Washington-based American Physical Society, the nation's largest group of physicists.

Three former national security advisers - John Deutch, deputy defense secretary and CIA director under Clinton, Harold Brown, President Jimmy Carter's defense secretary, and John P. White, a deputy defense secretary under Clinton - add their cachet in support of a boost-phase defense in this summer's issue of Foreign Policy.

Shooting at a missile before it breaches the atmosphere allows a defensive system to aim at a large, flame-spewing rocket (instead of a small warhead) in a stage when it can't release decoys, proponents say. It's attractive to the Russians because the geographically specific defense wouldn't alter the balance of power or upend the 1972 antiballistic-missile treaty, which bans national missile defenses.

While Postol wasn't the first to think up a boost-phase defense, he's one of the only scientists to rigorously study its possible use. And he may have also given Russians the idea, at least one based on a joint defense.

In September, the MIT professor briefed scientists and officials on the boost-phase defense in meetings at Russia's parliament, ministries of defense and foreign affairs, and the department overseeing the country's early warning system against nuclear attack.

"Unfortunately, it appears the Russian government is listening to him more closely than the US government," said Geoffrey Forden, a military analyst at the Congressional Budget Office soon to be a senior research fellow at MIT.

Although Pentagon officials agree the boost-phase defense could be effective, they believe such a sea-based system couldn't be ready until around 2012. And they don't want to wait that long.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

War Studies' Fall From Grace

2005-05-17T20:10:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
Globe Staff
1/30/2001

The Cold War had just ended and the scholars in the American academy who spent their adult lives studying the minutiae of war machines like MIGs and MIRVs were growing antsy. Everything on which they had built their careers was seemingly crumbling just like the Berlin Wall: The Soviet Union had collapsed. NATO, bereft of an enemy, was adrift and searching for a mission. And after so many years girding for World War III, the United States began mulling peace dividends.

That's when a leading security studies specialist cracked. University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer went into a tirade after a fellow academic suggested Mearsheimer's defense of military science was little more than "special pleading for a field in terminal decline." The barb, Mearsheimer charged, showed a growing - and unfair - bias against the study of war.

"I think this description of the security studies subfield is simply preposterous," Mearsheimer wrote to the professor at the University of California at San Diego who snubbed his life's work. "What is the evidence that the subfield is in terminal decline? . . . What is the evidence that our work is more narrowly focused than other subfields of political science?"

Nearly a decade later, Mearsheimer's 1993 letter has an air of prophecy. The study of war has declined dramatically since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 as students of international relations have turned away from the dangers of nuclear war and toward the intricacies of global trade.

But people like Mearsheimer warn that the seeming bias against securities studies is dangerous in a society that values civilian oversight of its military. They say that colleges and universities are creating a general, tepid international relations curriculum that obscures the danger of large-scale violence by focusing too much on economics.

Today, evidence of the decline of military science on college campuses is ubiquitous:

The number of college courses offered in security studies has plummeted by about 30 percent since the end of the Cold War, according to a study of a quarter of the nation's top schools by the Smith Richardson Foundation, a leading source of money for security studies research.

"The reason for the latest drop, anecdotally, appears to be that professors are retiring without replacements," said Marin Strmecki, director of programs at Smith Richardson. "It also appears that there's an accelerating trend in political science and history that are making these courses increasingly irrelevant."

As a result, hundreds of doctoral candidates, unemployed post-doctorals, and aspiring assistant professors have been competing for only about 30 security studies jobs listed annually in the American Political Science Association's newsletter.

The flow of money to the field is also drying up. Despite the booming economy, foundation grants to college-level international peace and security studies programs has actually dropped by nearly 7 percent to little more than $11 million since 1990. In that same period, foundation grants to all other causes more than doubled.

Even ROTC programs are feeling the pinch. Since 1990, the number of Army training corps on college campuses around the country dropped from a peak of 413 to 269 programs, about the same number as before the Vietnam War.

The decline of security studies has unveiled the subterranean tensions between political scientists. Over the past decade, the hostility has moved beyond the closed doors of the faculty club and has spilled onto pages of the most prominent political science journals, as supporters and critics of security studies unleashed combative articles with apocalyptic titles such as "Rigor or Rigor Mortis" and "Should Strategic Studies Survive?"

"A specter is haunting strategic studies - the specter of peace, " writes Richard K. Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.

Ultimately, he has implored his colleagues not to let the comforts of peace blind them from the most important justification of their field - the unfortunate inevitability of war throughout history. "If war does become obsolete, the wasted intellectual effort in continuing to study it will have been a small price. If it does not . . . future generations may be glad that we kept our intellectual powder dry."

The debate over the future of security studies in academia starts with the field's definition. Whatever term is used - strategic studies, military studies, or war and peace studies - political scientists as well as national security specialists in government and think tanks have been pushing for a broader definition of the field.

Since the Cold War - and often to the chagrin of security studies veterans like Mearsheimer - critics have called for the field to be broadened beyond traditional topics such as nuclear deterrence, the balance of power in terms of troops and tanks, and sweeping military strategies. Instead of limiting the field to studying "the threat, use, and control of military force," as Harvard security studies professor Stephen M. Walt defines it, they believe the subject should include the spread of infectious diseases, drug trafficking, environmental hazards, global poverty, and international economic ties.

In late 1995, shortly after the flap over the UC San Diego position, the debate ignited again. David A. Baldwin, a Columbia University professor who specializes in international political economy, suggested in an article that security studies was quickly becoming irrelevant and that the field should be abolished for a broader "foreign policy curriculum."

"The message was that I should have never published the article," Baldwin said of all the critical letters he got in response. "I got a lot of flack and it seemed to me they wanted to suppress my views. My point, which these guys would not accept, is that if you only study one instrument of statecraft, you can't compare its utility. Before deciding whether military force is the right solution, you need to know something about economic sanctions."

The field of security studies was born out of the noted military strategy tome "On War" by Prussian General Carl Von Clausewitz, but it didn't emerge as a unique academic discipline in the United States until after World War II. Before that, scholars say, the country relied on the military to devise and justify its war plans.

After the devastation of World War II and the dawn of the nuclear age, scholars began to view security policy as "too important to be left to the generals." Soon, university programs sprang up around the country, including Princeton's Center for International Studies, Columbia's Institute for War and Peace Studies, MIT's Security Studies Program, and Harvard's Center for International Affairs.

The field rode Cold War tensions until Vietnam. The war in Southeast Asia turned the tide back on those making a living studying war. Scholars such as Harvard's Samuel Huntington began to be viewed as the enemy within by liberals, part of the military-industrial complex, and they became targets for death threats. The backlash even boomeranged on the military's ROTC program. Since 1965, the number of such officer's training programs at the nation's top universities has dropped by half.

Moreover, critics began to question some of the most prominent tenets of security studies, such as the "domino theory," which held that, if one country in a region became communist, others would follow. Such thinking, critics charged, was both simplistic and wrong.

A new group of security studies' scholars saw a resurgence in their field following the collapse of detente and the rise of the Reagan administration. But the rise of arms control and the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade later seemed to take away the soul of strategic studies.

At the same time, a movement toward "peace studies" began to displace security studies. Some schools and foundations even changed their names to account for the new era: Stanford changed the name of its Center for International Security and Arms Control to the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Carnegie Corporation change the name of its Cooperative Security Program to the Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.

The difference was not only semantic. While both fields focus on preventing conflict, peace studies seeks nonviolent solutions, such as deepening cross-cultural engagement or strengthening international legal institutions.

"The failure of security studies is that it doesn't make students knowledgeable about all the tools of peace," said Robert Johanson, a senior fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. "They usually instill within students that war is a necessity at some points. And that the only way to prevent war is to be ready to win it."

Now, despite a thriving debate in academic journals over everything from humanitarian intervention, the prospect of cyberwarfare, and the role of US forces in peacekeeping efforts, the study of war on college campuses is a dwindling discipline.

"The anecdotal evidence is everywhere: It says people who are doing diplomatic history and security studies are having a lot of trouble getting jobs," said Michael Desch, associate director of the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky.

The scant offerings now often bar even the best graduate students and post-doctorals in the field from ivory tower positions.

Ben Valentino was graduated from Stanford, received a doctorate from MIT's Security Studies Program, has had his dissertation accepted for publication by Cornell University Press, and at age 29 is a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. After two years hunting for a job, applying to every position possible from the University of Wyoming to the University of Florida, he has been called only once for an interview.

"I don't know how I'm going to pay my rent if I can't find a job or fellowship after this spring," he said. "If I don't find anything, who knows, I might apply for a job teaching private high school."

To one of Valentino's mentors at MIT, it's unconscionable for such a promising candidate to have so few opportunities in a field that offers the best hope of preventing the kind of horrific violence that marred the past century.

"It's a disaster if anyone is serious about not studying war," said Stephen Van Evera, an associate political science professor at MIT. "Any society that wants to forget the past of large-scale killings is headed for big problems. To not seriously study conflict is like not studying cancer: At some point someone is going to be affected by it."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Adjuncts' Woe

2005-05-17T20:06:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
Globe Staff
1/01/2001

With tens of thousands of dollars of debt, Larry Kaye is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.

Counting pennies and worrying whether she'll have work in a few months is just a part of life for Barbara Gottfried.

And, even if occasionally he hits up his family for extra cash, Victor Manfredi says he now prefers an ascetic lifestyle - riding a bike because he can't afford a car, living in a group house, and forgoing the expense of children.

The three highly educated 40-somethings are downtrodden veterans of a thriving lower tier of academia. Despite surging endowments and ever-rising tuition, colleges throughout the country are increasingly relying on "adjunct" professors, a low-paid subset of academics who rarely receive health or retirement benefits, have little or no say over the direction of their colleges, and usually have no job security.

Now, for the first time in any city, the 10,000 or so adjunct professors in Boston - among the nation's largest population of part-timers - are organizing a united front to fight what they view as exploitation and the lowering of standards in higher education. By banding together, they hope to pressure the city's colleges and universities to improve their working conditions.

"A teacher's working conditions are a student's learning conditions," said Gottfried, 48, a women's studies professor who struggles to get by on what she earns from teaching several classes a year at Boston University and Merrimack College. "We basically have no rights and we feel the integrity of higher education is under threat from the extensive use of adjunct faculty."

Today, nearly half of all professors in the United States are considered adjuncts, up from a fifth in 1970 - and their ranks are growing. More than two-thirds of all professors hired between 1995 and 1997 were non-tenure track adjuncts, according to the US Department of Education.

To survive, the part-timers often teach as many classes as possible, often at multiple schools, sometimes sacrificing quality for quantity. They complain their workload is often twice that of fulltime faculty for less than half the pay. With so much time spent in class or in office hours, they have little time to grade papers, consider assignments, or advance their career by writing books or journal entries.

Many of these academics are part-time in name only.

In a recent survey of adjunct professors in Boston by the American Association of University Professors, 65 percent said they consider teaching their major source of income, even though the majority teach only one or two classes a semester at an average of $2,200 a course.

For years, those daunting numbers have haunted Steve Almond. The 34-year-old adjunct professor of composition at Emerson and Boston colleges says he found himself repeatedly scrawling figures into a grading book during class.

If he had 18 students, he would multiply that by their tuition (about $30,000) and get $540,000. Then he would divide that number by eight (the number of classes a student takes a year) and arrive at $67,500, the amount they were paying for his class. Then he would divide by $2,500, the amount the college paid him for the course, and the result would be what he dubs the "Adjunct Exploitation Factor."

"It's a Catch-22; I love teaching and the departments I taught for," said Almond, who now spends most of his time writing fiction and journalism, and editing. "But it was impossible to support myself and do creative work as an adjunct. It's really untenable to do it for a living."

Unwilling to give up their career after devoting so many years to it, Gottfried and Kaye set out to build on a 1998 victory for adjuncts at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. After more than a year picketing the school with support from the university's faculty union, the regular part-timers won from UMass a pay raise and the right to buy into the university's health plan.

Soon after, Kaye, a 40-year-old adjunct philosophy professor at UMass-Boston joined up with Gottfried and others to establish a local chapter of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, a national group that works to improve the lot of adjuncts, graduate assistants, and other poorly paid academics.

Their short-term goal is to establish the nation's first citywide network of adjunct professors. By organizing the part-timers, they hope to build an alliance with sufficient leverage to negotiate everything from higher wages to health benefits to rules ensuring academic freedom at the city's 58 institutions of higher education.

With support from national groups, the emerging union began picketing in September at Emerson College, where two-thirds of the faculty work part time. Gottfried said the group has already recruited more than half of Emerson's adjuncts and is planning to spread their efforts soon.

"There are just a huge number of professors exploited in this city," said Kaye, who teaches seven classes a year at UMass and ekes out a living on an annual salary of about $25,000. "I call it exploitation, because they're taking unfair advantage. They pretend we're short-time, temporary workers. But we're just as much a fixture as most tenured professors."

The adjuncts, however, have no illusions. Organizing in Boston, they know, is particularly difficult because nearly all the institutions are private and, therefore, lack faculty unions. A 1980 Supreme Court ruling forbids full-time faculty at private colleges from establishing unions. Without anything on the ground, they must build from scratch.

And by their nature, adjuncts are a hard group to organize. "Many work in isolation and suffer from the absence of community support," wrote Richard Moser, a member of American Association of University Professors, in a journal article on the Boston effort. "In addition, their lack of tenure and due process rights leaves them feeling vulnerable to retribution."

Manfredi, 44, who received a doctorate in linguistics and social anthropology from Harvard, has lived on the edge of poverty for years, scraping by on pittances from schools including Northeastern, MIT, and Harvard.

But as hard as it is, Manfredi still has his pride. He insists he prefers his life to that of a tenure-track professor, a job he tried for many years to land.

"There was a clear moment which came relatively early in my graduate training, when I was aware of being sorted by my supervisors into the ‘politically unreliable' basket, and thus red-lined away from tenure-track shortlists and cushy fellowships," he said. "At the same time, some of my peers were being `zoned in' to the elite, but in many cases the cost to their intellectual integrity was more than I was ready to accept."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

A New Union Battle

2005-05-17T20:03:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
GLOBE STAFF
4/13/2001

AMHERST - Their doors have been smeared with shaving cream and ketchup, urinated on and glued shut, and one had his set on fire. Other insults include slanderous notes scrawled on their message boards and throughout their halls. And then there's the bullying, death threats, and violence: A drunk student threw one headfirst into a cement floor.

It's not easy to be a resident assistant at the University of Massachusetts.

This week, the university's RAs declared they had enough. In a move to win better pay, job security, and other benefits - such as a clear contract - students who represent the school's 364 dormitory RAs told university officials they intend to become the nation's first undergraduate RA union.

"A lot of us have just become disgusted with our working conditions," said Chris Fierro, a 21-year-old junior and one of the RAs who in the past week helped file a union election petition with the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission, which will probably rule in May. "We are sick of questionable firings, a vague contract, and working for less than minimum wage."

The move opens a new front in the national battle over whether university students have the right to unionize. So far most of the legal fights have been waged by graduate teaching assistants, who argue that they are employees of the university, not just grad students.

At UMass, where graduate teaching assistants unionized 11 years ago, chancellor David K. Scott said the university would not tolerate an RA union.

"Undergraduates at the university are clearly students," Scott said in a prepared statement. "The administration does not support the effort to unionize, and will follow established procedures expressing our position on the petition for recognition."

About two-thirds of the campus's RAs have already signed cards saying they want to join the union, which is backed by the United Auto Workers and would be affiliated with the graduate students union. Part of what's fueling their campaign, they say, is that many RAs believe the university has misled them on everything from their compensation to their rights.

Instead of earning $137 for 20 hours of work a week, as the university asserts, they say they're really earning only $50, or $2.50 an hour, after residence officials subtract the cost of their rooms, which the RAs say are supposed to be free. The RAs also say, despite university denials, that they are at risk of being fired and thrown out of their rooms without due process.

Their union movement has been fueled mainly by a 30-page manifesto published last spring by a senior who spent three years as an RA at UMass. Citing a 50 percent turnover rate among RAs, Gregory Essopos issued a call to arms to his fellow dorm monitors: "If workers are happy with their jobs, there is no need to unionize," he wrote. "It is clear, however, that in this situation workers are not happy, and it's time to do something about that."

Not long after the dense paper was published, the university fired two RAs, a move students in the budding movement called "questionable" and "arbitrary."

"It started to occur to a lot of us that we had less rights than our residents," said Mark Griffin, 22, a senior who has been an RA for two years. "It was wrong and it was time to act."

When Fierro and about 40 other RAs marched to the provost's office last week to demand recognition, they weren't welcomed. On Monday, UMass associate provost Susan Pearson met with nine of the disgruntled RAs, they said, and declined to act on any of their grievances. The students left and, according to the RAs, said, "We'll see you at the MLRC."

Before the RAs can take a formal vote to unionize, the Labor Relations Commission must rule on whether the students are legally eligible to form a collective bargaining unit.

University residence officials say they go out of their way to make sure the job is completely clear to RAs before they start. And they add that students are thoroughly screened, trained, and supported by the administration throughout their term.

As for compensation, UMass officials say it is misleading to suggest RAs earn only $50 a week. Unlike other undergraduates, RAs live in a double room alone and are provided with a free high-speed Internet connection. The price for other students to live in such accommodations would be about $3,200.

It is also wrong for RAs to suggest they are subject to an arbitrary disciplinary process, they say. In the past two years, the university fired only 13 RAs out of more than 700 on the job during that time. All of those, they add, had the right to appeal those decisions.

"They're definitely putting a twist on the issues," said Michael Gilbert, director of the university's housing services, who said that, despite the difficulties, twice as many students this year applied to be an RA than there are slots open. "We don't believe we're hiding things. We tell them clearly at the beginning what our expectations are. But I guess sometimes their expectations aren't met."

Not everyone feels exploited. Some RAs scorn their fellow students' efforts. Union foes also warn that all students will end up paying the price for a union, subsidizing higher wages and benefits for a small group on a campus with 18,000 students.

"It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic," wrote Rob Schulze, 20, a junior RA, in an editorial headlined "Kill the Union" in the campus's student newspaper. "The reasons for an RA union are either flat-out wrong, simply hilarious, or beyond the scope of organized labor."

An hour or so before midnight this week, in a dingy dorm office plastered with posters of Che Guevara and Noam Chomksy, about a dozen RAs mulled their movement and did their best to answer why they would want to spend so much time in a thankless job that often requires undergraduates to write up neighboring students for drinking or blasting music.

For some it was about being part of a support network that helps students overcome personal academic problems. For others, it was about the extra cash and a large subsidized room. And for some it was about the camaraderie they share with other RAs.

For Tanya Herron, who was once shoved onto the floor by a drunk man in her hall, it's about the ultimate reward. "I guess it's like being a parent," she said. "The thank yous aren't always clear. But you know people appreciate what you're trying to do."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Lessons of Leisure

2005-05-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

Recreational Studies Come Into Vogue

By David Abel
Globe Staff
8/04/2000

Neither the oxymoron in the name of her major nor its lack of academic gravitas ever really bothered Jill Henneke.

While other students needled her for majoring in "leisure studies" - watching her
go ice climbing or sailing while they pored over hefty textbooks in more sterile settings - the 26-year-old recent graduate was happy to earn a degree by learning the intricacies of recreational activity.

"A lot of people stereotype adventure recreation," said Henneke, referring to her specialty at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vt. "But it's not just sitting around a campfire and telling ghost stories."

In spite of its rocks-for-jocks reputation, leisure studies have carved out a significant and growing niche in academia. Leisure studies professors train their students in everything from the finer points of wilderness living to marketing sports programs as "therapeutic recreation. "

Today, more than 350 US colleges offer leisure studies programs, according to the National Recreation and Parks Association, a college accrediting group. And, with the boom in outdoor recreation from skiing to whitewater rafting, many students are landing lucrative careers in recreation management.

But wherever students and professors go, no matter how serious the discipline, the joshing jostles them.

"Granted, there's an image problem with the name," said Cary McDonald, acting chairman of the leisure studies department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the country's first programs. "It's amazing how many times our faculty has sat around talking about our name. Yeah, we're not physics or science, and we're kind of at the bottom end of the social science environment. But we shouldn't have to fight a battle for credibility."

What gives such programs a bad reputation, academics in the field say, are those schools that focus more on the practice of recreation than the study or business of recreation.

One potentially prickly example is Green Mountain College's recently announced partnership with the Killington ski resort. While students in the leisure studies department will learn about the administrative side of running a multi million-dollar mountain, school officials say, they'll also spend a good chunk of their time on the slopes.

"It's really ironic because the public recognizes the value of leisure," said Bob Riley, chairman of the recreation and leisure studies department at Green Mountain. "Yet when push comes to shove, we have to put up with comments about 'all you do is play all day.' "

The credibility problem forced a shakeout in the field about 10 years ago, as high-profile programs at schools such as the University of Maryland and the University of Oregon closed their leisure studies departments. But today, with the economy soaring, more people taking vacations, and tourism expanding throughout the country, the numbers of leisure studies programs and students entering the field are rebounding.

There aren't any recent surveys that document the upsurge, according to officials at the National Recreation and Parks Association. But leading professors in the field say the growth is especially evident in the demand for professors. Unlike most academic departments, where jobs are scarce, leisure studies departments across the country are trying to cater to more undergraduates and fill open positions.

"We're really hurting for PhDs in our field," McDonald said. "We need more faculty. There were a hundred faculty jobs open nationwide (this year), and there's no way to fill them right now."

Leisure studies is the outgrowth of college parks and recreation departments, which began cropping up in academia after World War II when the combination of prosperity and baby-boom families increased the demand for organized recreation.

In the 1960s, with the rise of sociology and new fields in social sciences ranging from ethnic studies to gender studies, many of the parks and recreation departments began changing their name to leisure studies.

The discipline then shifted from its initial mission of training future park rangers or planners for city parks and recreation departments to delving into the sociological underpinnings of leisure, professors say. Today, there's even something called the Academy of Leisure Studies, which has a Web site featuring "white papers" on subjects including "The Problem of Free Time: It's Not What You Think," "Leisure's Relationship to Health," and "Leisure Apartheid."

Jokes over the arguably light subject matter started shortly after many of the college departments adopted the new academic title, professors say. And the jeering hasn't let up.

While professors in the field admit that leisure studies, like the legendary under water basket weaving or the more realistic physics for poets, have long attracted athletes or others interested in easy classes, they say spotty academic curricula have given way over the years to more rigorous standards.

"Too many of those curricula were created too quickly, were subpar intellectually, and were built around recreation," said Geoffrey Godbey, a leisure studies professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of "Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time." "But a lot of those programs have disappeared, and unlike years ago, I don't find people twitching to ask me if I have a ping-pong table in my office."

Though snide comments are still part of life for an academic in leisure studies, it's now more likely professors find people interested in their work, Godby and others say.

One source of such interest increasingly comes from officials in China and South Korea, where prosperity affords people more free time and more cash to spend. Godby and others say they often receive calls about translating their work.

Although there may be new opportunities and widening acceptance of the field, leisure studies professors' earnings haven't kept up with those in other academic disciplines. According to a 1999 survey by the College and University Personnel Association, leisure studies is one of the lowest-paying disciplines, not paying much more than the average $33,912 earned by those teaching secretarial services in 1998.

But as tourism continues to grow and people have more free time - a 1997 study by Godby and a leisure studies colleague at the University of Maryland found Americans have an average of 40 hours of free time each week, five more hours than in 1965 - money and jobs ar expected to burgeon.

If Jill Henneke's experience is any measure, the future looks bright for leisure studies majors.

It didn't take her long after graduating from Green Mountain College this spring to land a fulfilling job. Little more than a month after graduation, she moved to West Virginia to oversee a program that takes troubled kids into the wilderness to teach them about more than starting fires and setting up camp.

"It's a chance to do some good for the kids, to teach them lessons about life," she said. "It's exactly what I wanted out of a job. And I don't know if I could have done it without studying what I did."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Male Call

2005-05-17T19:05:00.000-07:00

Enrollment Trends Widen Gender Gap, Upset Social Scene

By David Abel
Globe Staff
11/05/2000

There were more men on the dance floor than usual. But not enough.

As Sheila Erimez slipped on her high heels, the beat of salsa beckoning her, she watched as some women in Boston University's ballroom dance club reluctantly decided to dance the sensuous samba with one another. Others resorted to taking turns with the available men.

"There just aren't enough guys to go around," said Erimez, a slender blond junior majoring in English. "They're dropping off like flies. Wherever you go on campus, there are more girls than guys."

The 20-year-old and her friends were griping about an increasingly depressing fact of life for many women at colleges throughout the country: Today less than 45 percent of US undergraduates are men, down from 55 percent in 1970, according to national surveys. Utah is now the only state with more men than women in college. Last year, women accounted for 56 percent of all students at colleges in Massachusetts.

The gender gap is particularly pronounced at Boston University, where women now account for 61 percent of the total undergraduate student body. Women dominate classes and student government. Theater troupes are desperate for male actors, and men are so scarce that women often outnumber them at that once all-male bastion, the gym.

The increasing dominance of female students in American higher education is particularly striking because they represent just 49 percent of the population between ages 18 and 24.

To explain the trend, some argue that boys have fewer role models and are falling behind as girls are given more attention in school. Others believe that the changing ratio is more a reflection of greater numbers of older women returning to college.

At BU, the theories include the school's abandonment of its varsity football and baseball teams, the university marketing itself as a "safe, urban school," and the popularity of its many study-abroad programs with women.

"We really don't know why this is happening," said Kelly Walter, director of admissions at BU. "It concerns us in that ideally it should be 50 percent men and 50 percent women. But we're not planning on making it easier for men to get in. That would be illegal. We're most concerned with enrolling those students who are most academically qualified."

Whatever the cause, women have been extending their majority over men at BU since the late 1980s. This year, women account for 62 percent of the freshman class, and school officials expect the gap may widen over the next few years.

The disparity is even greater at some of the university's undergraduate schools. In the College of Arts and Sciences, BU's largest school, 67 percent of freshmen are women; in the College of Communication, 69 percent of freshmen are women, and in Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, 83 percent of freshmen are women.

The imbalance has long piqued women at BU, but, each fall, freshman women who expected a more balanced social scene are particularly bitter.

"It pains me; it's very hard to meet guys," said Amy Horowitz, 18, a freshman, while dining in a female-dominated dinner crowd at the university's student union. "If I knew this before coming here, it definitely would have factored into my decision. I guess I feel a little gypped."

A recent study by the American Council on Education suggests that talk of a male crisis in higher education is overblown. Men still predominate in doctoral, professional, and master's programs such as business and engineering. They also continue to maintain a majority, if slimmer than ever before, at top schools such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

One of the main reasons for the uptick, the report says, is that more minority women than men are going to college.

"We can't get distracted by talk of broad problems," said Jacqueline King, the report's author and director of ACE's Center for Policy Analysis. "We do have pockets of real concern. The gaps are biggest between the racial gaps. For African-American men, for example, it's not cool to look smart, and so many have little interest in college."

Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Center of the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, disagrees.

While he acknowledges concern over minorities, he said he believes there's a larger problem for all men - and that it's only getting worse. His evidence: 54 percent of all bachelor's degrees went to white men in 1977; 20 years later, men are getting less than 45 percent. By the end of this decade, he believes, the number will drop to 40 percent.

"What this reflects is that schools and family circumstances are not helping boys enough," he said. "The problem is, boys don't have enough adult male role models, and that our increasingly urbanized world caters less to men than it used to."

The problem of declining male enrollments has even sparked talk of affirmative action for men. At a recent meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the issue was front and center. At one panel meeting, academics explored the topic "Are Our Boys at Risk?" while another session was called "Where Have All the Men Gone?"

Although male affirmative action is still little more than a hypothetical for academics to mull at conferences, it's a concept some students at BU find appealing.

It's not rare there for large introductory classes in psychology or political science to be two-thirds women. Men are outnumbered by nearly 2 to 1 on the main student governing body, the executive board, and both the president and vice president are women. And to fill the gap on the social scene, parties often include students from other schools.

Of course, not everyone considers the unequal ratio a problem. On a recent night at the Sargent gym, Chris Szczerban was sweating on a stationary bicycle, the only guy in a room filled with women trudging along on other exercise equipment.

"I went to an all-guys high school," the 19-year-old sophomore said. "I would say this is definitely a good thing."

And while straight women may complain, the lesbian culture is thriving, said Emily Lyman, 20, a junior who is president of Spectrum, BU's gay and lesbian group. "It's not hard for a lesbian to get a date here," she said.

Many professors also see the influx of women as a benefit. For Richard Ely, who teaches Introduction to Psychology, a large class where it is easy to count the men, women play "a civilizing role."

"There is certainly far less of a macho, testosterone atmosphere," he said. "For teaching, it's particularly good and allows you to try new things and raise controversial views. I might feel less comfortable doing that in a class 75 percent men."

The lack of machismo has other perks, too. According to Herb Ross, BU's associate dean of students, the incidence of violence and other disturbances in student dorms has decreased as the ratio of women has increased.

Still, for most, the problems of the gender gap outweigh the benefits.

For instance, film major Pierluigi Cothran last week posted fliers in the theater school, desperately beseeching: "Male Actor Needed for Student Film." As much as the 20-year-old junior has looked, he hasn't had any luck.

"No one has responded at all," he said. "It's just really hard to find guys at this school."

As the salsa music throbbed earlier this week below the student union, Erimez and a group of other well-dressed women watched forlornly as more women filed into the dance hall. One told a story of having to compete with another woman in a ballroom dancing competition last year. Another complained about how many of the men on campus are homosexuals, or jocks uninterested in dancing with women.

"I just wish I had a partner," she said. "I don't want to look ridiculous dancing with another woman again."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Breaking Ranks

2005-05-17T19:04:00.000-07:00

By David Abel
Globe Staff
4/06/2003

She grew up the daughter of well-off conservatives, aspiring to be president.

He, the son of a lifelong Democrat from a working-class family, dreamed of becoming a rap star.

Both from New York and bright enough to study at MIT, the two have thoroughly rejected their roots, staking out such opposing positions that the shades of their opinions come only in black or white.

To Aimee Smith, 31, who recently completed a doctorate in material sciences and founded the group Social Justice Cooperative, the United States is the world's chief purveyor of terrorism. She has become one of the city's leading organizers and loudest opponents of the war.

To Presley Cannady, a 23-year-old electrical engineering major who rebuilt the campus's defunct Republican club, the Bush administration has set a righteous course to spread freedom and defeat unrepentant enemies. That's the point he makes as a regular counterprotester at antiwar rallies.

In a time when doubts plague so many people on the nation's latest conflict, Smith and Cannady occupy a lonely, unforgiving ground, where certainty prevails over mixed emotions.

"I'm not someone who doubts what they come to believe," Cannady says. "It's about what the president calls moral clarity. Unlike liberals, who take pride in wrestling with ideas, I would say conservatives like me set a course and find less value in second-guessing ourselves."

No matter how liberal her views, however, Smith doesn't see any ambiguities about the war in Iraq. Without the slightest vacillation, she believes her convictions reflect the truth.

"The US government is responsible for murder and undemocratic regimes around the world," she says, arguing the attacks on Sept. 11 are an understandable case of the "chicken coming home to roost. . . . How can a country responsible for mass graves in Panama and supporting the killings of thousands of Kurds in Turkey be taken seriously when it says it's using force to bring democracy to Iraq?"

Smith and Cannady know each other well, and have sparred frequently, hurling invective everywhere from e-mail and the campus newspaper to public debates and antiwar rallies.

"She says I'm heartless; I say she's crazy," Cannady says. "You could say we have a sort-of friendly disagreement, but it can get heated."

This is how Smith describes their rapport: "I have deep concerns about almost everything he says. I would argue he promotes racism, religious intolerance, sexism, and the might-is-right philosophy."

The two may be fierce ideological opponents, but in many ways, they're opposite sides of the same proverbial coin: both believers rebelling against their parents, both radical activists eager to broadcast their views, both so sure of themselves that compromise could risk injuring their identity.

Raised in the suburbs of Buffalo and Baltimore, her dad a well-paid manager at Bethlehem Steel, Smith got involved in politics at a young age. From her father, a member of New York's Conservative Party, she learned to revere Ronald Reagan. She campaigned against Mario Cuomo, the state's liberal governor, and pored through conservative publications around her home, such as the National Review and The Washington Times.

A one-time homecoming princess and the president of her class, she opposed abortion, supported the death penalty, and promoted tax cuts and trickle-down economics. During the 1988 presidential campaign, her family, strong supporters of George Bush, had their own videotape of the infamous Willie Horton commercial "Justice on Furlough." "I bought into the thousands points of light," she says.

Things began to change for Smith when she chose to attend the California Institute of Technology instead of the Air Force Academy. The engineering school's male-dominated environment opened her eyes, she says, to many of the isms - sexism, racism, ethnocentrism. She began reading Ms. magazine and listening to Pacifica Radio.

Then came Noam Chomsky. After she heard the linguist speak at MIT she began reading his withering books and essays on US foreign policy. "It was the most complete blow to my illusions," she says. "I went from believing in the system to feeling totally disaffected by it to being overwhelmed by its hypocrisy."

For Cannady, a descendant of slaves, the transformation wasn't as dramatic. His dad, who fixes telephones for a living, would sometimes talk politics.

When he was young, the family lived in Queens and read The New York Times, which Cannady now views as an organ of liberalism. Still, like most kids, he preferred sports and music to politics.

Cannady's family moved to upstate New York and he attended a mostly white high school. Though he says he experienced his share of racism, he never saw it as an overwhelming problem.

He began studying martial arts and spent much of his free time listening to hip-hop music. A lot of the music was laced with political and left-leaning messages, but he says he ignored them.

As a sophomore, when he read Toni Morrison's "Beloved," he says, "I found it pretentious and long-winded."

Cannady's political views began to gel his freshman year when he took a political science class at MIT. The United States had started intervening in Kosovo while he was reading "On War," a set of essays on the uses of military force by Carl von Clausewitz.

Watching the war unfold, Cannady says, "I kept asking myself: `What is it about liberals, with their brainy president, that they care more about international institutions than the United States?' The war just wasn't in our national interests."

The Kosovo conflict also prodded Smith to take her already strident views to the next level - street protests. Ironically, though for very different reasons, she arrived at the same position as Cannady.

"I thought it was horrible we were bombing the Serbs," she says. "The level of hypocrisy was too much."

Soon after the mass protests against globalization in Seattle, she founded the Social Justice Cooperative and organized conferences against bio-engineered food in Boston, marches against the World Bank in Washington, and even the smashing of a giant phallic symbol at MIT to protest sexism.

While Smith moved farther to the left, Cannady lurched toward neo-conservatism. For him, abortion equaled murder, the death penalty deterred crime, and Americans shouldn't be inhibited from owning guns.

It was during the 2000 presidential campaign - Smith was a diehard member of the Green Party - that Cannady started organizing Republicans on campus.

He brought in speakers, including the conservative commentator David Horowitz and the Republican Senate candidate Jack E. Robinson and held rallies promoting George W. Bush.

Smith and Cannady, however, didn't really collide until shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Smith, raised a Catholic, began wearing a hijab, an Islamic headdress, in solidarity with Muslims. After the US bombing began in Afghanistan, she organized antiwar rallies and posted statements on the Web calling it a "criminal war."

Cannady says he knew eight people who died in the World Trade Center and questioned the patriotism of Smith and other protesters of the attacks on Afghanistan.

"This is a war that they started, and we are finishing," he says. "I don't think Aimee is a loyal American. Patriotism isn't only about exercising our rights and freedoms; it's also about defending our values, in words and actions."

Their debate has only intensified since the bombs began falling on Iraq last month.

Cannady, now a senior, has helped organize demonstrations at the French consulate and in support of the troops. Smith, detained for "unauthorized political solicitation" after protesting recently in front of the JFK Federal Building, continues to wear her hijab and has attended nearly all the major antiwar rallies.

Dug into their positions, the two don't see eye-to-eye on anything - except, perhaps, "the bias" of the mainstream media (Smith sees the media as flunkies of right-wing companies; Cannady views it as a perch dominated by elite liberals).

They last saw each other at a recent campus protest. Screaming into a microphone, Smith denounced the war before a crowd of hundreds of MIT students and faculty members. When a fellow activist told the crowd, "I love humanity," Cannady screamed back, "You also love Saddam!" and he and other war supporters held up signs saying "Free Iraq."

Each has attracted about 15 hard-core members to their groups, and both have built networks they say include hundreds of like-minded activists.

Yet, as much as they argue, as much as they try opening the other's mind, neither will concede the other may have a point.

Smith: "I'll never think Presley is right. This is a war of conquest for resources, aiding people supportive of the administration. It's about domination, control, and money."

Cannady: "I respectfully disagree. This is a war to protect the American people and a war of liberation for the Iraqi people."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe